| Graphics Help |  |
| Basics You Need to Know About Graphics | |
| Graphics Help | |
| Basics You Need to Know About Graphics | |
| There are certain things you need to know in order to add graphics
to your pages. Although all graphics will follow these guidelines, the ones we are the most concerned about will be photographs or anything you scan into your computer to use on your website. Hopefully, programs that offer you clipart and graphics for use on the web, will already be optimized for the web, however, this is often not the case. Aside from wanting your pages to look their best, the major issue with graphics is the space they take up, which affects load-time. Graphics must be optimized for use on the web, or they may be slow enough to kill your whole site. FrontPage offers the option of showing your graphic at any size you choose in the FrontPage program. This is not a good option to use. If you ask for the image to be shown at a larger size than the original, it will distort from "stretching" and will look pixelated. If you ask it to show at a size much smaller than the original, it will show the way you want it, but it will take as much load time as if you had used the large sized original. Microsoft has included Image Composer with the programs on the FrontPage disk. This program can do some really nifty things, however, it can't do the most basic things you need to do regularly for your web pages, and it takes some time to master. (Note: I am far more familiar with the older version of Image Composer that came with FP 97 than I am with the one that came with FP 98. I did check it out just enough to know that although it does even more cool stuff than the older program, it still doesn't do the basic necessities.) There are many many graphics programs available, at a very wide range of prices. Very few of them have just the right combination of features we need for basic web pages, are easy to use, and are inexpensive. There are only two programs I would recommend: Paint Shop Pro, from Jasc Software, and Photo Impact by ULEAD. (Best prices I could find on the web 6/23 were $89 for PaintShopPro and $99 for PhotoImpact4) Both pieces of software allow ample trial use as full featured programs. PSP has the advantage of being very well known and having a lot of tutorial sites all over the web. Both of these programs allow you to do the basic necessities of prepping photos for web pages, they also allow for the creation, from scratch, of most anything you would ever need/want to do, and they don't require an inordinate amount of time to master. They have features of the very best programs on the market. Regardless of what program you use, you need to be able to do some basic things. You may have a program now that will do these with the help of a couple of free or shareware utilities that you can download. You must be able to crop and resize images. Cropping means to be able to "cut out" just the area of the image you want. On scanned images this is often necessary to remove hazy edges or to take only the portion of the image you want to use. Resizing (called resampling in some programs) is actually changing the visual size of the image, proportionate to what it was to begin with. This only works well when you are making an image smaller, not larger. You must be able to adjust the dpi of an image. Dpi is dots per inch (or pixels per inch). If you magnify an image in your software, to the largest it will go, you will be able to see each little square of color that makes up the image. These little squares are pixels. Until recently, most software that dealt with images, was planned for the optimal printing of the images. In order to print a high quality image, you would use a resolution of at least 300 dpi, and maybe up to 1200 dpi. The web cannot make use of such high resolution. Anything over 72 dpi is wasted on the web. Not only is it wasted, but using a higher resolution than necessary will create a much larger file size and cause the image to be slow loading. Every second is crucial on the web, and if you think that people will wait to see your graphics load, you are making a very large and very common error. If your program will do all the necessary chores except allow for a different dpi setting, there are utilities you can use to optimize the images. (See: Changing the file size) I will be adding a complete tutorial on resizing images in PaintShopPro very soon. If you have an older version of PSP you can e-mail me for them now. If you are using PSP 5.0, you will need to wait until I get them done, however, if you have specific questions, I'll be happy to answer them. Take the time to prepare your graphics as they need to be done. It will make a big difference. |
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