Comments

90 minutes of practice in an auditorium with great acoustics does sound like heaven! Kelsey, What graphics program are you using now and what format is the picture in? I use Paint Shop Pro, and if the picture is in .bmp format, you can 'shrink' it and save it as .jpg - hope this helps. Kelsey, the rule is that if you want to keep the clarity, you have to keep all the pixels.

JPEG is not really an exception to the rule; the file size will be smaller than a bitmap, but it also loses some of the detail -- the trick is that it discards only detail that isn't really needed by the eye anyway. This could help you if you keep the number of pixels the same, and it's a photographic image (not a line drawing, for instance, or a comic).

If you want to resize an 800x600 image down to 400x300 and then be able to blow it back up to 800x600 -- don't.

You can try some tricks with the Blur and Sharpen filters, but there's only so much you can really accomplish with them to improve the apparent quality of an image.

Kelsey, that auditorium looks like a great practice room!

Patty, what does "lossless compression" mean?

If you have Photoshop (aka, most pirated piece of software ever), size the image down and then hit it with an unsharp filter or use the non-tweakable 'sharpen' filter. Try sharpening before resizing also, sometimes it looks better to sharpen first then shrink, sometimes the other way around.