Reducing the size of a picture without loss

Hello,

Newbie question . A friend of mine needs to get 256x256 pictures to put in a shop on a SL sim. The problem is that the original picture is around 3000x3000 and loses all its details when reduced. Is there a technic to do such size reduction in Photoshop without losing details in the picture ?

Thank you...

You can try experimenting with the various interpolation methods for resampling. (Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Image Interpolation dropdown box) But depending on the content of the image in question, it's unlikely that you're going to preserve much in the way of fine details. Going from 3000x3000 (9 million pixels) all the way down to do just 256x256 (65,536 pixels) means removing more than 99% of the total pixels in the image. Individual details smaller than about 10x10 in the original will be lost in the reduction.

Again depending on the content of the image, I would probably suggest going with 512x512 instead of 256x256 for a case like this. That would give you 16 times as many pixels to work with. If the image quality is still unacceptable at that size, then 1024x1024 might be justified. Just keep in mind, 512x512 is 4 times as potentially lag-inducing as 256x256, and 1024x1024 is 16 times as much. So do give some thought as to what's most important in the particular environment, speed or quality.

You say this is for a store. I would assume then that the place will already be pretty laggy, especially if it's in a mall. There are just too many textures on display at once in most malls for the average video computer to handle very well. So I'd likely err on the side of speed if I were you.

If these are images for sale, then one possible solution would be to put a low-res version of each one on sales floor for display, and then offer the customer the choice to buy a higher resolution version if he or she wants it. You could even set up the vendor box to display the hi-res version temporarily when the user clicks on it, and then default back to the low-res version after some amount of time. There are lots of possibilities.