Save for Web
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Hi David Can you please help. I have been posting images on a web gallery but they look rather pixelated at times. What is the best method to make sure my image is correctly sized. |
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| Here we are using Photoshop Elements2 but this is just as easy to follow in Photoshop. If you have been working in layers from the Layers menu select Merge Visible as this will make the process a lot quicker |
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| Our next task is to check the dimensions of our image, this can be done via the Image > Resize > Image Size or Image > Image Size in PS. Make sure that both the Constrain Proportions and Resample Image boxes are ticked. Now change the Resolution to 72 pixels/inch as this is all that is needed to view via a monitor |
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| We can now change the Pixel Dimensions or Document Size of our image, for e-mailing a document size of around 9 - 10 " on the long side is usually sufficient.. Some image galleries specify pixel dimensions in this case 600 pixels were selected |
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hold your cursor over the image |
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From the File menu select Save for Web, this will open the Save for web palette. This palette shows us two images - the one on the left is our Original image with a file size of 867K and the one on the right is the compressed image. We can click on the hand tool (top left in the palette) to move our way around the image compairing the two. From the drop down menu under Settings select JPEG and the drop down directly under this click on Medium - The information then shown under the compressed image will show us the file size of 44.74K and 17 sec @ 28 kbps which is the speed it will download on a 28K modem. The other important figure is Quality in this case 30 was chosen (hold your cursor over the image). The image size can be fine tuned using the Quality slider -by moving it to the right the number and file size will be increased. Moving the slider to the left will reduce the file size. It's also worth pointing out the the image can always be resized under the New Size heading but using the Image size palette also allows us to adjust the Resolution of our image.
What should we be looking out for..?? The more we reduce the file size of our image the more it will appear to break up or pixelate the differance can be seen in the two windows - Original image and JPEG as seen above. To achieve a target of 100kb we use the following settings for our image - Setting of High and Quailty of 65 this will take 36 sec @ 28Kbps Other Settings..Progressive - this will download images in stages ICC profile - includes information on colour management settings Both the above setting are not really required and will increase the file size of your image by a few kb |
