i have a Canon PowerShot S500 digital camera and most of the time i take high resolution shots, 1944 x 2592 pixels, so my camera is more than capable and takes beautiful photographs. However, when i drop them down to 150 pixels for MP avatars, the nice photo turns 'grainy' - the present avatar as is a good example.

any help or ideas? thanks! :)

It looks like compression artifacts. How are you resizing, and what save-as options are you using? Are you recompressing JPGs?

Send me that photo at andrew@mouseplanet.com and I'll see if I have the same problem.

Thanks Andrew for you help!!

i use Microsoft Picture It! Photo 7.0, and just pick 'Resize Image' .

I drop the size down from over 2200 pixels to the MP's 150, and just 'Save As'. There is an option on this feature to select a resolution, from 72 pxl/in to 1200 pxl/in. i've tried that at different values, but it doesn't seem to make an improvement.

These are jpgs, and i don't understand 'recompression'. maybe that's the ticket ??

the photo has been sent.

Does your program have a sharpen feature? And a blur feature? If so, you sometimes need to use the gaustian blur to keep the edges of the image from pixelating. Then you can sharpen it out, but you'll need to use the manual sharpen, instead of auto sharpen feature (that was a very sketchy explaination-- I have never used your program, I use Photoshop CS and Jasc Paintshop Pro-- if you have these features and want some further help, PM me). This also helps to adjust mildly out of focus pictures.

You can also just try the despeckle feature. It should be under "adjust" then "add/remove noise". Often a couple of clicks will fix it.

I also find that for avatar pictures, it is much easier to shrink images taken at 2mp or less. The higher the mps go, the more distortion you get as you shrink way down. (I know that sounds counterintuitive but it is the same reasoning that makes the following suggestion work too)

You can also try in the resizing option, reducing the pixels per square inch this will soften the image somewhat which should result in less pixelation.

Hope this helps.

And, somehow I know you're speaking English, right? I'll have to read this a bunch 'cause that's why I don't have an avatar.

These are jpgs, and i don't understand 'recompression'. maybe that's the ticket ??

the photo has been sent.
I resized and saved your pic in Paint.NET (http://moab.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/) and have attached it here. I didn't see the compression artifacts in mine that appeared in yours, so I'm not sure what happened. I specifically did not recompress when saving; that may have had something to do with it. Recompression is when you are editing a JPG and save it as a JPG; if you don't tell your image editor otherwise, it will usually apply JPG compression to the new copy, resulting in double-compression which can cause those compression artifacts.

Andrew's explaination is much better. :D

thanks to both of you, whitney and andrew!! - my first new avatar looks better already just by blurring. i'll try the other suggestions too. :)