Sooner or later you are going to either set up a website for your business or maybe create a blog about your life and one of the most important aspects of a success story is
compelling images. It is important to have just the right amount of compression so the image looks crisp and clear but small enough in size so it loads as fast as possible. An image that is not the correct type or is too heavy will severely drag down your websites ability to load. When your site loads slowly, you loose customers.
There are many different image formats available to the user. They are all used in different scenarios depending on the effect you are trying to achieve. Most normally used formats are bitmapped images. The majority of images that are online use this format. This category includes GIF images, JPEG images and PNGs. All these varieties have some form of compression in order to speed up how fast they load.
When you resize an image for the web, you have to draw a fine line between quality and loading speed. That is why so many of today’s commercial websites load so slowly. Many of them have a huge amount of high quality graphics to load before the page loading is complete. This combined with all the ads makes many WebPages load a lot slower then any of us would like. You have to consider that when you are resizing your image, you are essentially removing pixels. If you remove too many the image is going to look choppy and rough. You have to catch the image right on the border before significant image quality is realized.
Each type of image is going to have different characteristics so you have to decide what format you would like to use.
JPEG images are by far the most widely used and most popular of the image types. This is often the default save type of many imaging programs and cameras. The images are easily compressed and load easily on the web. If carefully optimized, you can get excellent image quality with fast loading times. For most applications, this will be your number one choice.
One of my favorite formats to use when I need a really good quality image that will load relatively fast is a PNG image. This image type is lossless, which means that it will retain the quality save after save. The drawback is the file will be larger then a JPEG but if you are only using a few images on a page that should not pose a problem. The image will certainly look a lot better then a JPEG and have less roughness around the edges. In other words, it will be clearer and sharper.
If you really need to tone down the size and vivid colors are not important, you might want to use a GIF image on your site. This format will look more pixilated and the colors will not be as intense. In addition, you can use a GIF for animation, which you cannot do with JPEG or PNG.
If you require a near perfect quality image and the importance of the image clarity supercedes that of download speed you might want to use a BMP. With a BMP there is virtually no loss in quality but you will have a substantially larger image size then all the other formats. There is no compression with this file type so the files can be extremely large.
Now that you know the difference in the file types it will be easier to make good decisions on which type to use for your next project. Have fun and experiment to see what works best for you.
Article by, Tech Joe Z
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