Rick Baker
08-09-2005, 08:57 AM
http://www.rickbakerimages.com/photography_advice/how_to_email_photos.html
One thing a lot of people want to know, but have a hard time figuring out, is how to email their photos to friends and family. It is fairly easy to attach a photo to an email, but ISP's email systems limit the file size of photos, so unless you resize them, you are likely to plug up the recipient's inbox and fail to send the photo. Mainly our goal here is to resize the photo so they can be sent, but I'll go over how to actually send the photos as well. I'll show you how to this with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements. First with Adobe Photoshop. I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, so your screen may not look exactly the same if you don't have the same versions.
Click here if you have Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 or 3 to skip to the easy way.
Click here if the photos you want to send are already in JPEG format, you have Windows XP and you want to try an easy way.
The first thing we want to do is open the photo we want to resize and email later. To do this, we go to the "File" menu and scroll down and left-click on "Open."
A dialog box, like below, will open up. You need to browse to the photo you want to open on your hard drive(s). You can pull down the menu at the top where it says "Look in: and find the drive it is on. When you find the photo you wish to open, just double-click on it to open it or left click once to highlight it and click "Open."
Optionally, you can open your photo in Photoshop by using Windows Explorer. Just go to the photo you want to open, right-click and select "Edit with Photoshop."
Our photo is now open and ready to be resized.
Go to the "Image" menu and scroll down to "Image Size."
Our image is way too big for emailing. It should be more like 500 pixels wide with a resolution of 72 dpi. Monitors can't really display anything over 72 dpi, so all that extra resolution is just a waste and just adds to the size of the file. If we wanted to print this photo, we would leave it at 300 dpi, which is a great resolution for printing.
Un-check "Resample Image", type 72 in the "Resolution" field and hit "OK."
Open the "Image Size" dialog box again and check "Resample Image."
Make sure "Constrain Proportions" is checked in the lower left hand of the dialog box. This maintains aspect ratio(it would prevent your from skewing the image). Type in about 500 pixels in the Width field at the top under "Pixel Dimensions:". With "Constrain Proportions" checked, Photoshop will fill in the "Height" field automatically with the correct number of pixels to keep the same proportion, so your photo won't get skewed. Click "OK" to resize the photo to the new dimensions.
Your image may look like this. If it does, double-click on the "Hand" tool in the toolbar. This resizes the image to "Best Fit" your screen. Here's another tip, hit "Ctrl and the + key" (hold down the Ctrl key and keep it held down while you hit the "+" key) to zoom in incrementally. Every time you use this keystroke combination, Photoshop zooms in more. Conversely, you can use "Ctrl and the - key" to zoom out.
The image looks much better zoomed in like this, doesn't it?
Next to the "Hand" tool is the "Zoom" tool. Double-clicking on the "Zoom" tool will zoom in on your image to 100% and show you the actual on screen size of the image.
Our image is resized, now we need to save it as a JPEG. A JPEG is a file format that uses compression to make photo file size's smaller, but unfortunately it lowers the image quality, so we need to find a balance somewhere where are file size is relatively small while maintaining decent image quality. The first step to do this is to go to the "File" menu and slide down to "Save for Web" and click on it.
You should be presented with a dialog box like this. In the "Preset" field, pull down the menu and select the Preset "JPEG High". Make sure the "Quality" field is set to 60. You can select a number between 1-100. "1" being the lowest image quality and "100" being the highest image quality. The higher you set this number, the bigger the file size. A setting of "60" is a good trade off between file size and image quality. Click "Save".
Navigate to where you want to save your photo, name the file what you want and then click "Save".
Ok, now we want to email our photo. I'm using Microsoft Outlook, but just about any email program can send photos as "attachments" and that's what you want to do. Start out a new message like you would any other message with the address filled in and subject line filled in, etc. In Microsoft Outlook, you just click "New" in the upper left hand corner to start a new email message.
We want to "attach" our photo to our email message as an "attachment." In Microsoft Outlook you can can do this by going to the "Insert" menu and choosing "File", to insert a file.
Browse to where your photo is on your hard drive and either double-click on it or left click to highlight it and choose "Insert."
Type your message in the message field.
Now click "Send" to send your photo.
You can also send your photo inside the message body, without an attachment. In Microsoft Outlook, go to the "Insert" menu, choose "Picture" and slide over and choose "From File". Then browse to where you have the photo on your hard drive and double-click on it.
Now I'll show you how to do it in Photoshop Elements. The technique I just showed you with Photoshop will work with Photoshop Elements. The steps and everything are pretty much the same, though the interface is slightly different. I would walk you through it in Photoshop Elements, but there is a much easier way I'll show you. Start up Photoshop Elements. If you encounter this screen, just click on "Start from Scratch." You may not have this screen though, so it's important that you make sure the Editor part of the program is open.
We want to open the photo we want to email. With Photoshop Elements open, go to the "File" menu and choose "Open."
Browse to where your photo is on your hard drive and double-click on it to open it.
Alternatively, you can open your photo with Windows Explorer. Use Windows Explorer to go to the folder where your photo is and right click on your photo and choose "Open With" and slide over to Adobe Photoshop Elements and left click.
Photoshop Elements does most of the work for us when it comes to emailing photos. It resizes, compresses, and sends easily. With your photo open, go to the "File" menu and select "Attach to Email."
Photoshop Elements Organizer should open up and you should see a dialog box similar to this. Click on the "Add Recipient" button in the bottom center of the dialog box.
Type in the name of the person you want to email the photo to and their email address too. Make sure "Add to Contact Book" is checked if you want to save the recipient's contact info. This will make it easier and faster to send photos to that person in the future. Click "OK."
Type a message to the recipient in the "Message" field and make sure that "Photo Mail (HTML) is selected in the "Format" field.
Click on the "Stationery & Layouts" button under "Select Size and Settings."
The "Stationery & Layouts" Wizard should open up. Here you can select some nice Stationery. Select something you like and then click on "Next Step."
You can further customize things here by changing the Background, Photo Size, Layout, Font, etc. Fool around with the settings here and when you get something you like, click "Done."
Photoshop Elements will launch your email program and start a new message with everything ready to go. All you have to do is click "Send." In this case, Photoshop Elements sent the photo right inside the message instead of as an attachment, which is good, because so many people are afraid to open attachments with all the viruses and worms, etc. floating around.
We just sent a photo via email with the photo in the "Message" field. You also have the choice to send a photo as an attachment. Maybe you just want to type a long message and prefer not to have the photo cluttering up the the message area or something. If you want to do this, you need to select "Individual Attachments" in the "Format" field instead of "Photo Mail."
Photoshop Elements will launch your email program, create a message, fill it out, and automatically attach the photo for you. All you have to do is click "Send."
Here is an example of what the recipient will receive, first in the form of the photo in the message, using "Photo Mail."
Here is an example of what the recipient will receive in the form of an attachment.
The recipient needs to open the attachment to see the photo.
There's an easy way to email photos integrated into Windows XP "if" your photos are in JPEG format. I couldn't get it to work right, but it is "supposed" to work, so I'm going to tell you about it. Left-click on the photo your want to email or "ctrl-click" on multiple photos to select them.
Make sure the "File and Folder Tasks" menu on the left is expanded. If it is not, click on the two down arrows by "File and Folder Tasks". Next, click on "E-mail this file" or "E-mail the selected items", if you have multiple photos selected.
You will probably get a dialog box like below. Make sure "Make all my pictures smaller" is selected.
If you click on "Show more options...", you will get three choices of sizes to choose from. Pick which one you want and click "OK".
Windows will start Outlook and start a message with your photo(s) attached. Fill it out and just click "Send".
Article by Jeremy Baker
One thing a lot of people want to know, but have a hard time figuring out, is how to email their photos to friends and family. It is fairly easy to attach a photo to an email, but ISP's email systems limit the file size of photos, so unless you resize them, you are likely to plug up the recipient's inbox and fail to send the photo. Mainly our goal here is to resize the photo so they can be sent, but I'll go over how to actually send the photos as well. I'll show you how to this with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements. First with Adobe Photoshop. I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, so your screen may not look exactly the same if you don't have the same versions.
Click here if you have Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 or 3 to skip to the easy way.
Click here if the photos you want to send are already in JPEG format, you have Windows XP and you want to try an easy way.
The first thing we want to do is open the photo we want to resize and email later. To do this, we go to the "File" menu and scroll down and left-click on "Open."
A dialog box, like below, will open up. You need to browse to the photo you want to open on your hard drive(s). You can pull down the menu at the top where it says "Look in: and find the drive it is on. When you find the photo you wish to open, just double-click on it to open it or left click once to highlight it and click "Open."
Optionally, you can open your photo in Photoshop by using Windows Explorer. Just go to the photo you want to open, right-click and select "Edit with Photoshop."
Our photo is now open and ready to be resized.
Go to the "Image" menu and scroll down to "Image Size."
Our image is way too big for emailing. It should be more like 500 pixels wide with a resolution of 72 dpi. Monitors can't really display anything over 72 dpi, so all that extra resolution is just a waste and just adds to the size of the file. If we wanted to print this photo, we would leave it at 300 dpi, which is a great resolution for printing.
Un-check "Resample Image", type 72 in the "Resolution" field and hit "OK."
Open the "Image Size" dialog box again and check "Resample Image."
Make sure "Constrain Proportions" is checked in the lower left hand of the dialog box. This maintains aspect ratio(it would prevent your from skewing the image). Type in about 500 pixels in the Width field at the top under "Pixel Dimensions:". With "Constrain Proportions" checked, Photoshop will fill in the "Height" field automatically with the correct number of pixels to keep the same proportion, so your photo won't get skewed. Click "OK" to resize the photo to the new dimensions.
Your image may look like this. If it does, double-click on the "Hand" tool in the toolbar. This resizes the image to "Best Fit" your screen. Here's another tip, hit "Ctrl and the + key" (hold down the Ctrl key and keep it held down while you hit the "+" key) to zoom in incrementally. Every time you use this keystroke combination, Photoshop zooms in more. Conversely, you can use "Ctrl and the - key" to zoom out.
The image looks much better zoomed in like this, doesn't it?
Next to the "Hand" tool is the "Zoom" tool. Double-clicking on the "Zoom" tool will zoom in on your image to 100% and show you the actual on screen size of the image.
Our image is resized, now we need to save it as a JPEG. A JPEG is a file format that uses compression to make photo file size's smaller, but unfortunately it lowers the image quality, so we need to find a balance somewhere where are file size is relatively small while maintaining decent image quality. The first step to do this is to go to the "File" menu and slide down to "Save for Web" and click on it.
You should be presented with a dialog box like this. In the "Preset" field, pull down the menu and select the Preset "JPEG High". Make sure the "Quality" field is set to 60. You can select a number between 1-100. "1" being the lowest image quality and "100" being the highest image quality. The higher you set this number, the bigger the file size. A setting of "60" is a good trade off between file size and image quality. Click "Save".
Navigate to where you want to save your photo, name the file what you want and then click "Save".
Ok, now we want to email our photo. I'm using Microsoft Outlook, but just about any email program can send photos as "attachments" and that's what you want to do. Start out a new message like you would any other message with the address filled in and subject line filled in, etc. In Microsoft Outlook, you just click "New" in the upper left hand corner to start a new email message.
We want to "attach" our photo to our email message as an "attachment." In Microsoft Outlook you can can do this by going to the "Insert" menu and choosing "File", to insert a file.
Browse to where your photo is on your hard drive and either double-click on it or left click to highlight it and choose "Insert."
Type your message in the message field.
Now click "Send" to send your photo.
You can also send your photo inside the message body, without an attachment. In Microsoft Outlook, go to the "Insert" menu, choose "Picture" and slide over and choose "From File". Then browse to where you have the photo on your hard drive and double-click on it.
Now I'll show you how to do it in Photoshop Elements. The technique I just showed you with Photoshop will work with Photoshop Elements. The steps and everything are pretty much the same, though the interface is slightly different. I would walk you through it in Photoshop Elements, but there is a much easier way I'll show you. Start up Photoshop Elements. If you encounter this screen, just click on "Start from Scratch." You may not have this screen though, so it's important that you make sure the Editor part of the program is open.
We want to open the photo we want to email. With Photoshop Elements open, go to the "File" menu and choose "Open."
Browse to where your photo is on your hard drive and double-click on it to open it.
Alternatively, you can open your photo with Windows Explorer. Use Windows Explorer to go to the folder where your photo is and right click on your photo and choose "Open With" and slide over to Adobe Photoshop Elements and left click.
Photoshop Elements does most of the work for us when it comes to emailing photos. It resizes, compresses, and sends easily. With your photo open, go to the "File" menu and select "Attach to Email."
Photoshop Elements Organizer should open up and you should see a dialog box similar to this. Click on the "Add Recipient" button in the bottom center of the dialog box.
Type in the name of the person you want to email the photo to and their email address too. Make sure "Add to Contact Book" is checked if you want to save the recipient's contact info. This will make it easier and faster to send photos to that person in the future. Click "OK."
Type a message to the recipient in the "Message" field and make sure that "Photo Mail (HTML) is selected in the "Format" field.
Click on the "Stationery & Layouts" button under "Select Size and Settings."
The "Stationery & Layouts" Wizard should open up. Here you can select some nice Stationery. Select something you like and then click on "Next Step."
You can further customize things here by changing the Background, Photo Size, Layout, Font, etc. Fool around with the settings here and when you get something you like, click "Done."
Photoshop Elements will launch your email program and start a new message with everything ready to go. All you have to do is click "Send." In this case, Photoshop Elements sent the photo right inside the message instead of as an attachment, which is good, because so many people are afraid to open attachments with all the viruses and worms, etc. floating around.
We just sent a photo via email with the photo in the "Message" field. You also have the choice to send a photo as an attachment. Maybe you just want to type a long message and prefer not to have the photo cluttering up the the message area or something. If you want to do this, you need to select "Individual Attachments" in the "Format" field instead of "Photo Mail."
Photoshop Elements will launch your email program, create a message, fill it out, and automatically attach the photo for you. All you have to do is click "Send."
Here is an example of what the recipient will receive, first in the form of the photo in the message, using "Photo Mail."
Here is an example of what the recipient will receive in the form of an attachment.
The recipient needs to open the attachment to see the photo.
There's an easy way to email photos integrated into Windows XP "if" your photos are in JPEG format. I couldn't get it to work right, but it is "supposed" to work, so I'm going to tell you about it. Left-click on the photo your want to email or "ctrl-click" on multiple photos to select them.
Make sure the "File and Folder Tasks" menu on the left is expanded. If it is not, click on the two down arrows by "File and Folder Tasks". Next, click on "E-mail this file" or "E-mail the selected items", if you have multiple photos selected.
You will probably get a dialog box like below. Make sure "Make all my pictures smaller" is selected.
If you click on "Show more options...", you will get three choices of sizes to choose from. Pick which one you want and click "OK".
Windows will start Outlook and start a message with your photo(s) attached. Fill it out and just click "Send".
Article by Jeremy Baker