On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 AMANDA D'ARCY" wrote> > Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction towards some > appropriate reading on the topic of optimising images for web -
Hi Amanda, Sorry to come in late on your query, but I only subscribe to the digest version. Your topic is something I've struggled with myself. I've read that there is no longer any need to keep to the web optimised palette of 216 colours. Good quality in web images does seem quite elusive - one of the best examples I've seen of fine quality is our own Martin Evening, http://www.martinevening.com/, e.g. the rendition of hair. Everyone is advising the .jpg and .gif file formats, with good reason, but things are changing, and ones to watch and maybe experiment with are jpeg2000 and .png. The former avoids the artifacts produced in compressing the file. .png was designed for the web, and is likely to get increasing use as tiny file sizes becomes less important with the increasing uptake of broadband, and the reduced code now recommended by the 3WC standards body for website design (XHTML instead of HTML). You don't need to be an expert to design with XHTML and CSS positioning, Dreamweaver does it automatically. I'm certainly not expert, but I've had very fast loading results with 600x600 pixel images. A page I have under construction for a client is www.tessakennedy.co.uk - the images are not final quality as I'm still experimenting with batch processing workflow sequences. Taking noise/grain out of an image helps before sharpening (www.neatimage.com), sharpening can be high, med or low band specific (again in Neat Image, but a separate process to the noise/grain reduction), and Irfan View (www.irfanview.com) will allow a batch process which uses much better algorithms for downsizing than Photoshop (notably Lanczos). For gods sake, don't look at my websites for examples of all this! They were done a couple of years ago before all this started to dawn on me, and are pretty slow and clunky. Best wishes Tony Riley www.sharpedgegallery.co.uk www.photosightdesign.co.uk _______________________________________________ Prodig subscriber options - articles - links - calendar - items for sale http://www.prodig.org
