Okay Monica, I understand your confusion so I won't babble on with a load of technical jargon that will leave you even more confused.
I use Photoshop Elements as my preferred graphics software program, as does George and a couple of others on the Forum, so if you are able to purchase this program then you'll get good support on its use here.
If you're going to be doing a lot of image manipulation, enhancements, etc. especially for posting on the Forum, then you would benefit from a dedicated software program.
I will leave it to George to explain the use of IG Pro for image resizing.
I use a Nikon D60 digital camera for all my photographic work and opt for the normal image quality setting (not the high quality that you have set) and this gives me image sizes of 3872 x 2592 pixels in the region of 2.30 MB.
Using Photoshop Elements I can get the image down to a size of 660 pixels wide and 87 to 128 Kb with very acceptable quality.
The way I do it in Photoshop Elements is as follows:
1) Crop my photo.
2) Then reduce the cropped image down to a dimension of no wider than 660 pixels. I find this to be an acceptable size without creating scrollbars on the Forum page for viewing on a normal sized monitor.
3) Using the
Save for web option in Elements you can reduce the 'quality' setting of the image in real time until you can get the size to 128 kb or less.
I would suggest that if you take photos for the intention of showing them on the Forum, then it may be advisable to set your camera accordingly, so that you're not getting photos at the size of 5MB.
You'd end up with better quality images at the end of the process, as you're not having to strip out too much extra baggage from the start.
George and other members may have other suggestions for you, so it's something for you to consider for now.
Laurie.
