Changing the bpp of a bitmap

[Craig Pittaway]

I've managed to grab a screen image to a .bmp file on disk (using code found in Codeguru). Unfortunately the bitmap is huge (over 2Mb) because I think that it's saving it in true colour. Is there an easy way to reduce the number of colours and hence the size of the bitmap, ideally down to less than 100k ish.

Cheers,
Craig.

changing bit depth is going to reduce the size to ~700K (24 bit ->8bit per pixel). Why don't you consider a file format with compression ie. tif, jpeg, png? I am assuming that resolution is where you want it to be(meaning you grabbed from screen and want to display at full size on a similiar monitor).

good luck

[John Holifield]

Here is a quick and dirty way. Open your .bmp with msPaint.exe and Choose Save As.. Then you can select what type of bitmap you want. There are also some pretty good Bitmap samples at this site, if you need a coding solution.