Having trouble resizing

[lyssa615]

*Windows XP/3.98*
I need to reduce the size of a photo so it's no smaller than 700x700 px and no larger than 1400x1400 px. Maximum file size has be 1.8 MB (however it's a landscape photo so the width will need to be more pixels than the height). I resize it but it leaves the file size too large. I tried lowering the jpeg quality when "saving as" but this does not seem to alter the memory, only the disk size. Unless the file size IS the disk size?? I am confused...any suggestions would be appreciated!

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

If you loaded a file from disk, then resized it, then saved it as JPG, the size on disk shown in the Information won't change — it still shows the original file size on disk. Then the size in memory will be much bigger. You need to load the saved JPG image to see the updated info.

JPG images are compressed, so they will be smaller on disk than in memory.

Look at the size in Windows Explorer and you can see that the file size will be much smaller — I get a file size on disk of about 1100 Kbytes for a JPG image of that size at the highest quality setting. Saving at a quality of 90 will barely degrade the quality at all, but the file size will be much smaller — about 400 Kybtes. I use a quality setting of 75 for high quality images and 50 for medium quality.

[lyssa615]

Thanks for your reply. I think I see what you mean. The file I am resizing was uploaded straight from my digital camera but it's just too big.