I've been ask to implement a site that is using a very large background image. Like 1600 X 900. It's 700K. I don't know how to make this smaller and still save it's quality. It's a black and white photo, I was saving it as a GIF. Any advice.
use photoshop to save it as a jpeg at 60% quality. if you don't know how to save for web, when you want to save, hold ctl+alt+shift and the S button.
Photoshop will show you a preview of the quality and the file size if you use 'save for web and other devices'
Unfortunately there are limits to how small a file can be before it starts to degrade. GIFs are usually more appropriate for smaller and fewer-color images like logos and buttons.
Because GIFs use indexed color, each pixel has a color byte associated with it which means that each pixel adds file size. In a JPG the file size is dependent on many factors, its usually the best option for non-geometirc images.
Even if JPEG always has more colors than GIFs, you could convert it to Indexed colors and back to RGB, just to have a smaller number of colors in your JPEG. This will make it somewhat smaller.
Also of course raise the compression level.... 69% seems to work fine. Sometimes, you could go so low as 49% or so... try blurring the image - and you won't see the pixels as clearly.
Related
I've an original image which is shown here. This is a HD image which is saved as jpg format. jpg is a lossy format which compresses the image when loaded on websites. So I saved the image as .png and tried to view it in my website, but the image was blurred. I even increased dpi of the image in paint.net, but the image was still blurred in my website.
Here is a screen shot of my website:
I want HD image to be shown in website without any blur. How can I do it?
Start with a higher resolution original image
I assume you are working from the similar looking template image, and the smartphone's screen has been added in after? The original image you linked to is only 600x212 pixels which is a very small size to work from (smaller than many mobiles, iphones and tablets). You need to start with a much larger and higher resolution image, and shrink it down as needed. Starting with a smaller image and increase the resolution or dpi cannot increase the quality since no extra details are added - often this just makes images worse.
This image is the same background but slightly larger at 850x300. Any editing like adding the app's image should be done at this larger resolution (it can easily be shrunk later but this will keep the quality as high as possible). Placeit.net sells the 1920x1440 version of the image for only $8 which should be large enough and scale down well.
JPG vs PNG
JPG is designed for photos and doesn't lose much, PNGs can be too large which affects load times, which are very important for mobile users. A high resolution JPG is the best approach examples and explanation. Every separate edit made to a JPG reduces the quality a little, so starting with the largest resolution image and doing a single edit is best. The resizing can be left to the web browser and responsive CSS.
Responsive CSS
This allows you to use the same HTML for both desktops and different sized mobile devices, with minimum changes which are controlled by a separate CSS file. Bootstrap and foundarion are the most population. Effectively you keep the key images at their largest size, then add media queries to the CSS to check size of the mobile device or desktop and adjust sizes accordingly. Images can also have their size specified in relative units, eg percentages. This css-only resizing is fast and efficient.
Google's image optimization guide covers lossy vs lossless, tools for fine tuning, scaling images and more. This points out that lossy/raster image formats are fine for very complex images like photos since human eyesight cannot perceive every detail anyway. What is 'lost' from the image is not normally noticable to the human eye - presuming of course you start with a high quality image.
Other options: progressive jpg and base64
Progressive JPGs appear to load faster than JPGs because they initially load in a way that looks like a lower quality image and then increases in quality, see example. Base64 is mostly used for small images like icons and 'above the fold' images that need to load quickly, although they can be demanding on memory. The image is stored using a very long alphanumeric string embedded in your CSS or webpage code rather than as a separate file. More details here
Frist you must ensure you original picture is clear enough and have high dpi
Second you must notes that nowadays the smartphone screen definition is much higher than common PC, so your picture must have enough definition.
Third, your cellphone browser mustn't have cloud speeding. Some cellphone like Opera may lead to image compression.
At last, I recommend you use high-quality jpg format image. You must keep a balance between size and definition.
I would come straight to the point:
PNG image or JPEG if forced to resize over its current form will produce lower quality output. Best way is to use 1600px wide and whatever length image you have and use image optimization softwares such as OptiPNG, PNGQuant or XnView and compress the output image to gain substantial ammount of compression.
Something about dpi
It won't affect too much for desktop browsers, and meanwhile if yu have an image with initial dpi of 72, there will be no gains to put image over 72 dpi after it.
The solution i use
Most of the time, we work on illustrator for graphics, so we build SVG from them. SVG is scalable till the end of screens, no loss of quality at all. As far as PNG and JPEG are concerned it is much better to use larger dimension image and compress it will tools. There is one great online tool for this stuff Kraken
One beautiful Trick
In photoshop, gimp: try sharpen your image. Sharpening will increase edge contrast and you can hack around from bad surce image too.
As far as base64 is concerned, it is bad idea to put an HD image of around 110 KB's in code, every time user open's your site will get your 110KB wasted, let them be stored in cache through either css: .class{background:url('image'); position:cover;}.
The only way to get better results is by minimizing http request but that is too much of headache. As only method right now is too make a image sprites.
If you want an HD image then you should download an HD image and edit it in Photoshop where you can solve all your requirements bcoz it's the way it goes in industries.
I am exporting my web images from PSD by 'Save For Web' option along with using its Quality and Format controls as per the standards but when I check my image size they are heavy than the expectation. I see the image sizes on other web. Their GIF images are too small. i.e a bullet arrow GIF image (12px X 48px) is near around 90 bytes but when I create the same image in PSD and export as GIF my size goes upto 1 KB. I just wanted to know that is their any other way to export or create images for web to gain lower size?
You can check how many colors are you using.
If you create a GIF with less colors you get a smaller GIF.
The size also depends on how many colors are in the image, maybe the 90 bytes gif is pure black and white and yours have more colors.
When you Save For Web in Photoshop, there are a few variables you can play to gain lower size, that you already use. I tried to explain some for other users who find this question,in case you already know how them works:
Lossy: Lossy compression lets you compress more bytes out. Higher value produces low image quality and less weight.
Colors: More number of colors used in the image causes higher size image, as aleixventa says in his answer.
Web Snap: That's the option to convert the color of the image to web safe colors. More web safe colors results in a smaller image.
Combobox "No Dither": Dithering mixes pixels of the gradients to simulate the missing colors. You could retrieve more specific info about this feature here. BTW, less percentaje of difussion dittering results in higher image.
With all these variables in mind, you can see the total weight while playing with them:
I am loading some images and I want to go from PNG to JPG to have a smaller file size. However as JPG there is no transparency information so the background of the image shows up as white.
How can I make this white background be transparent once I load my images?
Thanks in advance
I am assuming that you want to change the white pixels to transparent pixels at runtime. First I'll just say that the BEST answer , is to just use the PNG format. My opinion is that doing something like this at runtime is not a good solution. If you have that many images that the file size matters, then the runtime processing brings along it's own negative of a long pause while processing the images.
I personally would explore what I could do to decrease the size of the PNG files, and would likely NEVER use a solution like this.
However, if you choose to go this route, what you need to do is this :
Convert the image to a BitmapData with an alpha channel.
Loop through the BitmapData and make those pixels transparent.
or
Use the threshold() method of BitmapData.
As someone mentioned in the comments for your question, using white as the background color is not a good idea as ALL white pixels will be made transparent, not just the background ones.
So choosing a color that is not in the palette of any of these images is what you want to use as a background color
As a commenter noted, the threshold() method of BitmapData would probably work best.
JPG (Technically, JPEG File Interchange Format) files, as understood by common browsers and graphics applications, do not support storing an alpha channel with the image like PNG does. Depending on your application, you might want to store a separate black-and-white "image" file which is the transparency mask for the JPG, and use the pair. There are extensions to the format that can be used in custom software, but they won't be understood elsewhere.
But first, make sure that JPG is really what you want to use. JPG is only appropriate for "photographic" images, which don't typically have transparency masks (though there are certainly exceptions). If the image is more Icon/Drawing-like, then it is likely that JPG won't be much smaller than the PNG anyway, and have ugly aliasing artifacts, so just optimizing the PNG will give you better results.
You may want to consider embedding the png's in a Flash library, then export as swf. You can then use Flash to compress your png using the lossy JPEG algorithm, but it will still keep the alpha channel. This could result in much smaller file sizes but with the benefit of keeping the 8-bit alpha channel (each pixel has 256 transparency levels).
By masking out a specific color, you'll only get a 1-bit alpha mask (a pixel is either fully visible or completely hidden.) You can also run into problems like when the color in the image corresponds with the matte color, which deletes pixels from the actual image you want to display.
The other problem with using a matte color in a JPEG image is that the JPEG compression will leave artifacts, especially around the edges of the object and the matte color. This makes it hard to properly mask out a specific color.
I am trying to have High quality Images on my site like these ones in the slider here http://www.viewbug.com/ but when I have the actual of the picture, it wont load fast enough, due to the big size. I tried to re size it with photoshop but the quality of my photo would decreased a lot . so for example the following picture on this site http://www.viewbug.com/media/featured/2892642_large.jpg is high quality but small in size 377 kb, and then they re-size it with html code height = 900 and width =640 without ruing the ration dimension and it looks just fine inside the slider. I googled and I didnt find any javascript or html code that does this. how can I compress my images without loosing the quality
I'm a photographer, so I do this a lot. I export my images with compression settings that are invisible to the eyes, but reduce images far smaller than the original. Unfortunately, Photoshop uses a different compression scale than most JPEG programs (and JPEG is the only efficient and compatible photograph format for the Internet), and so for Photoshop, one needs to use specific instructions.
Try this tutorial:
http://inobscuro.com/tutorials/optimizing-images-for-web-35/
so by using punypng u can get the solution for dat. PunyPNG is a free website optimization tool that dramatically reduces the file size of your images without any loss of quality.
I have a site which uses a large image as a background. It's a jpeg that's 134KB in size - I can't really get it below that so far. I have saved it for web in photoshop on low quality jpeg setting. It's dimensions are: 1920 x 1028.
How can I reduce the size further?
Could I resize it extremely small and resize it with width and height attributes in the image tag - as long as the aspect ratio is the same?
Its killing my page speed. Please help - any advice welcome.
Without knowing the picture I can provide different ways:
1)
If you dont want your picture to be too prominent in the background, try to blur it (could be a lot - depending on the picture!) -> then you can us a higher compression rate without seeing the artifacts too much.
2)
depending on your picture, try to reduce it to certain color-ranges (that you use a max. amount of colors) -> with this method you might end up using a .png or gif file, photoshop will show you what is best.
One last thought:
As this is you BACKGROUND image, try to keep it in 'the back' - this way you can try and alter (destroy) the image in a way to reduce colors! On the other hand, try using smaller pictures (800x600) and let css scale them, again - depending on your intention.
I use 1280x1024px bg-images at about 55Kb.
hope this helps.
Try smushing it http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
Yes, you can use a smaller image. Your main options are
resize it on display (using something like <img
src="xxx" height="200%" width="200%">)
tile it
If it is a uniform background (pattern or similar), tiling probably looks nicer, as scaling up the image will degrade its visual quality. If it is a picture, you'll have to scale it.
I would definitely recommend resizing the image but keeping the aspect ratio. The smaller the better. Keep in mind however, that the smaller you go (less than 1:1), will reduce image quality. Having said that, generally image quality isn't mandatory to be super high for most backgrounds.
use Photoshop for resizing and make it according to your need such as 1024*800 or whatever u want,and then save it for web and device and there reduce the Optimized value of jpg hope it will work.
Unless you're willing to reduce the image's pixel resolution (like suggested by #sleske), there is probably no way to get image size much beyond what you have now. Photoshop's JPG export filter is top of the line in terms of quality vs. file size.
The only possible method could be splitting the image into sub-images, and compressing them with different settings ("slicing"). Large homogeneous areas can be saved at massively reduced quality without much visible loss, while detailed areas can retain higher quality. I think Photoshop has ImageReady for that.
If possible, save it as a GIF. GIFs are generally smaller than Jpegs.
you can use this online tool to reduce the size of image from MBs to KBs http://www.jpegmini.com/
I found a simple solution. It is to use office photo editor 2010 . just launch the application navigate to the directory with the images and simply click edit pictures on the right and then compress pictures . select what type you want i chose website. Successfully reduced size of jpg from 5mb to 50kb .
I tried many online image compressors but I liked this one most: http://compressimage.toolur.com/. You can play with various things like quality, compression methods etc.
You could have your server gzip images before sending in an htaccess file. (Assuming you run Apache)
If you have a lot of images, it could be intensive on your server's processor though.