How to lose your ass... bigtime!

[Mister X]

Originally posted by McAttack
Very good article Horg! i've always had a problem with my image compression. I usually lose a lot of quality. Then I go out and look at some stuff some guys are doing and it freaks me out that they get better quality in GIF than I get in JPG sometimes.

One thing that I have noticed is that the quality of the original image has a huge impact on how well it can be compressed. The better the camera used to take a picture, the less artifacting that is present in the original pic. The artifacting is often basically invisible to the eye but when you go to compress it, it complicates things.

Cutting down the number of resizings and compressings between the original image and the finished product can also help a lot with getiing clearer pics with a smaller files size. For instance the original pics might be 1280x1024 or even larger with quality set to 100. Naturally you don't want to use those on a paysite so you resize them to 800x600. You also don't want other sites ripping you off so you add a watermark or a small banner image to the pics. That's 2 operations on each pic to get it to web ready. If you need to adjust the colour or something it can be 3 or 4 operations. If it is saved in between each operation you are introducing flaws each time which can become magnified with the next operation/save. If you use a good batch program you can do all your operations for each pic with only 1 save between the original and web ready.