Compression tips and help

[autumnmyst]

Just curious if anyone has good Compression tips in Photopshop & ImageReady.

When i make graphics, avatars, buttons, banners, animations, ect...i always forget to compress them and end being too big..and i never really messed around with compressing files and gfx in those programs so any information would help :D

thanks again.

[digitalmind]

in photoshop, just go to FILE > SAVE FOR WEB.

here you can select all things to compress it.

I usually take a jpeg, 80% quality, that should leave you with good quality, and a very small file size :)

[Liam]

I usually use 70% but thats just me.
Also check them as both a gif or jpg because depending on the graphic it'll be a smaller size as a gif and higher quality.

[Koobi]

it depends on the colour in the image.

suppose you have an image that has a "colour overlay" over it or some kind of hue which is more or less one colour(like a blue shade over the pic) without a very big colour range in that case you had best use GIF coz it has 256 colours in it palette and so that would be your best bet as GIF is also compressed otherwise JPG at the settings specified by digitalmind and Liam will work

[monk]

yup, agreed, also, look into 3rd party compression tools too (ulead smartsaver off the top of my head but there are plenty more free ones) they save a lot of time on bulk images and get very slightly better results than ps can, not ground breaking differences but some beat adobe's compression enough for me to consider them :)

[DefRyder]

my first post :). uhh just make the quality very low...

[baxxy]

If the image has text or flat colour use gif,
If the image is a photo with lots of gradual change in colour use jpeg.

If the images are very small like thumbnails i tend to lower the quality to about 40% as people won't notice too much of a difference at a smaller size.


PNG is also a great format but not for web browsers unfortunately, but if you use flash or director PNG would be the way to go.

cheers