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Irfanview is a freeware graphics
utility for the Windows platform. It is included in
the TechMod image under programs. The following resources
help the user get started using Irfanview to edit graphics
for the web.
Resources:
GraphicConverter is the Macintosh
shareware graphics editing utility. MCPS has a site
license for this product.
Resources:
Also see: Webmaster
Software
Graphics for the web are generally
in standardized formats of GIF (Graphic Interchange
Format) and JPEG/JPG (Joint Photographic Experts Group).
A new type of graphics for the web is PNG (Portable
Network Graphic). These types lend themselves to web
use, as they can be compressed and still be distinct
enough for use on the web. As such, these graphic types
are generally a lot smaller than graphics used for printing.
Thus, they will load faster on a web page. See Web
Graphics Overview on WebMonkey more about these
file types.
The most important quality of web
graphics should be their small file size so they will
download to the page quickly. The high resolution required
for photographic printing is not useful for web images
as most monitors only show 72 dots per inch. Thus digital
photographs and scanner output images almost always
need to be converted to a smaller image for use on the
web. Since images to be viewed on a web page will be
small in physical size, graphics can be compressed without
losing their clarity on the web. In general a graphic
should be 25K or smaller. Even better is a graphic size
of less than 10K.
Steps for preparing graphics for
the web might include:
- Cropping to focus on relevant
detail
- Changing resolution to 72 dpi
- Resizing to small photo or thumbprint
size graphic
- Filtering or cleaning up color
saturation
- Save image for web as .jpg for
photograph or .gif for line art
For more details about graphics,
see also Web Graphics Overview by Jason Heffel and
Optimizing
Your Images by Tim Zieger. Both are on the WebMonkey
site.
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