Easy Web Site Design

It's said a picture is worth a thousand words. The ability of the Web to deliver multimedia, and in particular images, has contributed enormously to its phenomenal success.

To prepare graphics for your Web site you will need some form of image editing software. Three such programs are industry leader Adobe Photoshop; Jasc Paint Shop Pro, an economically priced competitor; and The Gimp - GNU Image Manipulation Program - a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

Purchase Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro.

Photoshop Tutorials from Good-Tutorials.com
Paint Shop Pro Tutorials from Aesthetic Web Creations
GIMP - Tutorials

Digital photographs may be downloaded directly to your computer from a digital camera. If you have traditional photographs, the prints or negatives must be scanned in.

Web graphics are generally stored in formats which compress the file size. This means file sizes (and hence download times) are kept as small as possible, but at the cost of reduced image quality, Creating graphics for the Web is a process of finding the best compromise between file size and image quality. Image editing software allows you to save images in various formats at different compressions. Generally the software offers a preview of how the compressed image will appear.

Web browsers generally display images in two main formats - GIF and JPEG. A third format, PNG, is supported (to various degrees) on later browser versions.

The GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) format was developed by Compuserve. GIF files can contain between 2 and 256 colours. The format is most suited to line art and images containing blocks of the same colour eg company logos. GIF 89a files may contain animation (animated GIFs).

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is widely regarded as the best format for photographs on the web. The JPEG compression algorithm offers a choice of compression level allowing the operator to select an acceptable compromise between quality and download time. Since some quality is lost every time a JPEG is saved JPEG files should not be used for editing, instead the image should be edited in its original form and only saved as a JPEG as a final stage.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was intended to be a replacement for GIF. PNG boasts an impressive technical specification and supports 24-bit and 48-bit colour. However, PNG is not supported on older browsers and only to a limited degree (ie not all PNG features are implemented) on newer browsers.

See also

Image Formats on the Web by Joe Burns, Ph.D. from HTML Goodies.

USENET newsgroup: comp.graphics.apps.photoshop

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