For those of us who are stuck in a minor market and refuse to pay $50 a month for DSL, about the worst "friend" you can have is the one who insists on sending you 2-megabyte picture files. If they have DSL, it takes them about 10 seconds for will most likely tie you up for the better portion of an hour. These wonderful 6.1-megapixel cameras produce wonderful prints, but you don't want to try and send these files without reducing them first. That 6.1-megapixel file is almost 32 inches long when you try to view it on a computer screen, anyway! Now I may not have the best way to reduce the sizes on these files and I'm not the most computer-savvy person, but the method below works very well with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe's more dollar-friendly Photoshop Elements (Elements is often packaged with the higher-end digital Single Lens Reflex [SLR] cameras). I'm sure that there are other programs that have some of the same features so that you can effectively reduce a file from 2.2 MB to a handy 49 KB or about a 45 times smaller file. Try some of the same features, in the same order, and see if you don't get reasonable results too.
Cropping and Resizing
First of all, remove any of the bad or distracting portions of your shot. Select the Crop Tool, and draw a rectangle around the area that you would like to keep. Hit the "Enter" key, and the rest of the picture will be cut away.
From the Photoshop Elements menu, pull down Image -"Resize" - Image Size; in Photoshop, go to the menu Image - Image Size. Although you want 200 to 300 dpi per inch when printing, you don't want that when you are sharing something via the Web. In the box that comes up under document size, change the resolution to 72 pixels per inch. Make sure that "constrain proportions" and "resample image - bicubic" are checked. While you're on this page, also change the width and height in the upper box. You can change the pixel dimensions or the document size. Most people have their computer screens on 1,024 by 768 or 800 by 600 pixels. For me a 600 by 400 (about 8 inches by 5.5 inches) is fine for a large Web picture for a horizontal picture and around 450-pixel width for a vertical. Please, no scrolling to see the whole picture! They can see the splendor of your fish without having to curse your picture and their dialup service.
Once you hit "OK," your picture will become much smaller on the screen. Click and grab the edge of the screen, pull it down, and make it bigger. Then hit "Ctrl" and the "+" sign at the same time to enlarge the picture back to 100 percent. You can also select "View" from the top menu and "Zoom In" until you get to 100-percent size. If you have to do any more playing with the colors or contrast, do it now. I do think it is important that you keep true to the colors, and don't try and juice them. If they weren't there when you made the shot, don't add them. When you are done, go to the pull-down menu "Filter," and then select Sharpen. If you've noticed, while you were removing all of those pixels earlier, your really cool picture had become sort of fuzzy. This can be really depressing when you've purchased a $1,000 camera, and it seems like you're getting pictures that are worse than your boring old 35mm SLR. Using the sharpen tool should realign those pixels again so that your photo is now as sharp as the original. Remember that you really can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. If your picture is fuzzy to begin with, take another shot. Don't rely on the sharpening tool to fix your focusing problems.
Saving for the Web
Now comes the nice part about Photoshop and its little cousin Photoshop Elements. Under the pull-down menu "File," select "Save for Web." You'll get two side-by-side pictures showing the "before" and the optimized-for-the-Web "after" picture. You can use the hand tool to move the picture around, and make sure the fish's eye is still nice and sharp. This will usually bring a picture that (after the reductions above) was 700K and reduce it to 45K when the quality button is selected to 50 percent and "medium jpeg" is selected. These options appear in the upper right-hand portion of the screen. If you want a larger or smaller jpeg, just click the quality arrow, and a sliding scale will appear. As you move this scale back and forth, it will give you an estimate of the file size. For a full-frame file, I don't think there is any reason to go over about 80K; 45 to 50 K is even better. Once your jpg is saved, it's time to share your pics!