Archammer wrote on Oct 27^th, 2009 at 1:33pm:

'Editing' is not permitted for the contest, so giving them the world's greatest editing program when they can't use it, goes to waste.

You are only allowed to resize images for the monthly contest... So it makes sense to use a very basic program to do so.

It would be like buying an Alienware computer for the simple task of using the built-in Windows calculator. You may as well just get a normal calculator.

Hagar, I assume the Gold Member comment was aimed at me. I am a gold member whereas you are at platinum level. I am 16 by the way. Age should never come into the argument. There are always people younger than you who can be more helpful. Equally, there are older people who can be more helpful. And of course, you get those who are older than you or younger than you, who provide nothing useful at all. I never look at the date of births of members on the forum unless I specifically want to know when their birthday is, so that I can wish them a happy birthday. I keep age out of the equation as it shows little.

I've had my say. I hope you will understand now how overkill Photoshop is for this issue. Editing is not allowed for the monthly contest. They asked for something to resize. Irfanview does this wonderfully and is highly reccomended by most users. If they were asking for a high end photo and image editing program, then by all means reccomend Photoshop. As I said, Photoshop is far too powerful for such a simple task. Keep it simple.

I'm out.

I had used an older version of photoshop for some time, but now I have converted to irfanview for resizing. I think it is really excellent for compressing pictures without too much loss of quality.

When I resize a picture to 1024 x 640 in irfanview I usually end up with > 90 % quality using the "safe for web" option. I almost never experience any jagged edges using this method.