RailRoadFan.com

Hi Guys, photos submitted to railpictures.net have to be so many pixels high by so many pixels wide. So my problem is when I start cropping to meet the requirements I lose a lot of the original image on the sides or top. Is there a way to meet their pixel requirement but keep the whole image. My pictures are coming out like 3024 pixels by 2000 pixels so I have to do a lot of cropping. By the time the picture is down to their pixel size the picture looks like crap.

I use "Photorazor" to re-size my pictures. It's a free download online.Don't know if it changes the pixel count but it does a nice job.

If you are using Microsoft, paint can even do that, I normally use windows picture manager to resize. Don't crop too much might get rejected for "bad croping"

I use IPhoto on a Mac.

If you are on a Mac and want something good that's free, try Gimp: http://download.cnet.com/GIMP/3000-2192_4-10322178.html

Lots of photo editing software will let you resize photos, not just crop them.

PhotoShop works for me. My photos out of the camera are like 4000 some wide. I change the width to 1024 and shoot for a height of some place between 683 and 710. You can crop your Original photo some what to get a better looking image or to hit the proper pixel height when you change the width to 1024.

I do something like what Aaron does. I shoot photos that are way bigger than they need to be, so that when cropping I don't lose too much of the good stuff. I use an old version of Photoshop, which allows me to crop down to a rough version of what I want (as far as framing the part of the image I want to keep), then I use the resizing options to bring the image down to the final expected dimensions. For example, once the image is cropped, I use image size to reduce the image to the desired width or height (which ever is smaller- I can always trim the image, but I can't add to it once I take something off), then use canvas size to crop the other dimension down to the required size. I like to do all of my rotating and other edits before changing the size, then I sharpen, adjust the colors and watermark once I've resized the image. I add a copyright watermark (pointless though it may be) to my images partly because I do not upload to railpictures.net, which automatically adds a watermark to uploads.

Windows has had photo editing options in their software for a while now, but I get better results using Photoshop than I did using the Windows tools. Especially in the area of cropping and resizing.