Hey guys, I'm an amatuer photographer, recently started playing around with PS and getting more confident with editing in general.
Decided I wanted to update my sig, possibly edit a few photos and make sigs out of them for others.

I'm having a hard time taking high quality photos and turning them into sigs of decent size. I don't know if it's common but they seem more pixelated than a normal sig.
I typically use 300+ pixels per inch to edit/print photos.
Getting a sig down to [roughly, though I would like to work with slightly larger dimensions] 3x1.5 @ 72ppi is difficult to still have the curves and objects ( trees , animals, etc) still showing their detail.

Any tips on how to work w/ low ppi and still preserve some of the quality in details?

quality of stock is always key. Also, we don't know what program you are using

Photoshop Creative Cloud

My Pictures are high quality RAW images. Just seems like by the time I can take it down to a signature size, you can't tell.
Idk if there's something I'm missing or a way to make the images take up less space.
Or if I'm just so used to seeing the images in a high quality that it's just my eye telling me it doesn't look right.

yeah you just gotta work with HQ stocks, look for lots of signature tutorials and do everyone you can. You will get the hang of it eventually.

Fair enough, thanks man.

72ppi should be completely fine for screen (you shouldn't be able to notice a difference in quality between 300ppi and 72ppi on screen), could you give maybe an example of a low quality sig?

also could you give maybe a screenshot of your settings what you use to save the file in image format?

this shouldn't happen really, unless something is terribly off with the photograph in the first place.
What i am guessing actually, is something off with the save settings, are you saving with the "save for web and devices" -option?

if you are turning down the quality in order to get lower file size, it's generally not required for an image of signature size. Rather using the right colour profile (sRGB is fine) and other settings is usually the way to go.

This post was edited by J1Tah on Jan 4 2017 05:51am

Will post.. hmm maybe its my monitor then ? I do have a POS lol

Edit:







This post was edited by Keasbey_Nights on Jan 4 2017 11:47am

Now link us raw too and maybe we can figure out your problem.

Quick disclosure about the uploads, the landscape shot was not originally a RAW file.
Looking back now I remember my settings on my camera were off that day. So it makes sense that the tree sig is not showing up in good quality anymore.
The shot of the two white ibis near the water was shot in RAW.

I don't know if there is a way to upload RAW files somewhere ( imgur does not recognize them from my SD ), but here are 300ppi Jpeg of the files.





Thanks for all the help guys

I took the jpegs you posted. Saved them on my computer, threw in ps, copied and pasted them on to my signature template, resized, added text and saved.

This is 66,3KB Saved as max quality jpeg


This is 66.7KB Saved as 95 quality jpeg (i wouldn't go below that ever though) i also added a gradient map to normalize the colours a bit, helps keeping down file size.



These are my template and save settings:





Also i am using CS5, because i used it while studying and got the student license

I hope this is of some help

This post was edited by J1Tah on Jan 4 2017 10:41pm