Preserved Topic: File Size?

Hey all, its been a while but I'm back

I've been getting much better with graphics since I last posted... though I'm still mostly cut paste and modify. I'm having a little problem though... I don't know how to get the size of my images small enough.

What I've been doing is just the "Save As..." and finding the best trade off between file size and quality using the number of colours/quality options for gif/jpg but I know they can get smaller and not lose the quality... I'm just not sure how. Are there more options available that I don't know about? or different programs other than photoshop that get better results for file size?

Thanks!

JMJimmy

PS Who's hording the black pills these days?

I see that your saving the images as GIF or JEP and your saying the options that are you don't know much about.

Saving, as a Jpeg should give you options of compression ranging from 1 to 10, 1 being the low file/quality and 10 being the biggest file size but best quality. If an image has lots of colours I would save it as a Jpeg about 6 or 8 on the compression/quality scale.

Saving as a GIF is different as GIFs handle colours in a different way. GIF are main for the web as they can give transparency, Animation and options of how many colour is the in the image and so on.

The option of saving for saving an image is up to you depending on what the image is for and like. Having a high quality image gives you a big file size and having low quality image give you a low file size, it is up to you what you want. If as you say that you would like to have an image at the highest quality but in low file size. I would say save the image as a Jpeg at 6 to 8 on that compression/quality scale.

If your using PS version 5.5 or 6 (Maybe Version 5 too) then the "Save for Web" option under the 'file' menu is you new best friend.

This command will open up a whole range of compression options. Letting you choose between GIF and JPEG file formats. Lossless compression and various intrelacing options. Colour reduction and Transparencies for GIF's. Along with other cool options like web pallet snap and matt transparency colour options.

Best of all you can choose to display the final result of the image in four seperate sub windows with different compressions rates/options and file formats with the resulting file size. You can just tweak and tweak and tweak untill you get that perfect compression/quality ballence. Furthermore, you can also save different compression styles that can be loaded and applied to other images when saving. To cool!

In addition to this, if you've ever wondered just how the slice tool works then it all starts to make sence here. You can select individual slices and choose different compression and file format options for each one. Furthermore, once you choose to output the sliced image you can also choose PS to create an HTML page with the sliced images all lined up in a table ready for use on the web. Even more functionality can be provided with Image Ready but that's a whole other cookie.

Hope it helped.

Drac.



[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 09-23-2001).]

You might also try Adobe Image Ready... it should come with Photoshop 6. It gives you several choices to view and lets you adjust them each to your liking so you can compare/contrast.

I thought the web save thing was exactly the same for PS and IR.

I don't know, I've never used the save for web feature. You may be right!

Hang on. Don't you work for Adobe?? Then again, I could be wrong. I only use IR when I want to do amination and even then I usualy set up each frame in PS first. And I hardly ever have the need to do any animation so...

I just use the Save for Web feature. Its much less time consuming than jumping to Image Ready.

I think people miss-understood me... I normally use the save for web option and do all those funky things. I can get decent sizes but I was wondering if there was another way that might get them even smaller.

take this image for instance:



6356 bytes... I should be able to get it under 5k or at least from banner ads I've seen elsewhere.

JMJimmy

I should also thank Shard for that image

From this thread

I made the image in my previous post and this one from it:




JMJimmy



[This message has been edited by JMJimmy (edited 09-24-2001).]

Yes, I work for Adobe, but I don't work in the Photoshop department.

There's obviously a difference between Save for web and Image Ready, otherwise they wouldn't ship them together. At least one that I've seen is that Image Ready let's you see how the image will look in up to 4 different ways of saving with dithering, color palettes, etc.