Optimizing JPG images using Photoshop7

A quick and easy "how to"

[Senator]

I recently developed a web site with a photo gallery. The images are all JPG, but have a variety of sizes and resolutions. I would like to modify them to be a fairly consistent size and the best possible quality. I have Adobe Photoshop 7, but never received any formal training. Any improvements I make to the photos are more luck than skill.

If anyone has or could create a relatively short (5-10 step) process for optimizing photos for the web using Photoshop, I would be most appreciative. Many thanks.

[Horse Feathers]

I'm not sure how much this will help, but this was my experience on creating images for an artist's website using Photoshop 6.0:

After sizing and cropping my images as desired (between 400-450 on the longest side -- that's at one image per page), I saved them as jpeg files with the following options:

Quality: 7 of out 12 (the compression is just visible if you look for it, but the load time is much better for dial up users)

Format Option: Progressive (giving viewers a "preview" of the image as it loads, and it loads in less time -- only hundredths of a second, but still)

Since the art on the site was for sale, I created an onClick popup window that had a highest quality (12 out of 12) section of each work to show the viewer better detail.

[benihana]

photoshop 7 comes with its web specific little brother - ImageReady.

At the bottom of the tools pallette there is an option to 'jump to imageready'.

Resize images using the image > resize image menu options.

If the images become a little blurry after resizing, use Filter > Unsharp Mask to subtly sharpen them.

If you have severe resizing to do (e.g. 3000 pixels down to 300 pixels), its often best to do it in small increments and use SUBTLE sharpening in between, e.g. size down to 2000, sharpen, down to 1000, sharpen, 500 etc etc

for optimising, IR has tabs at the top of the image, saying optimise, 2 up, 4 up.

Selecting the optimise tab will show you a preview of the quality with the current settings in the optimise pallette.(if you cannot see this select Window > Optimise)

Play around with the settings in the optimise pallette (haven tgot time to explain them all right now)

Generally, use .jpeg compression for photos and .gif compression for graphjic type images.

When trying different settings in optimise mode, imageready will show you the optimised filesize at the bttom of the image window.

good luck!

[mifi601]

first I would crop and work with curves. then batch process the whole bunch.