Contacting Other Sites to Advertise With

There are many formats for image files, including a great deal of formats that are meant only for use with certain programs.

For instance, you would never upload a .psd file, because that is a file that is exclusive to Photoshop, because it contains details about layers, channels, and vector graphics that will all turn to a single layer of pixels when converted.

The two file formats I’d like to cover here are the jpeg and the gif, because those are the two most widely used file formats for the Web. This is because jpegs and gifs can be compressed into very small file sizes while retaining a great deal of the original quality of an image. These are also the most widely accepted image formats, meaning that they will be viewable by any browser – no plug-ins required.

Note: If you want your image to be animated (such as a flashing “Click Here” on a banner), then your only option is to use the gif format. If you have an image that would be better optimized as a jpeg, then I’m afraid you’re out of luck. You’ll simply be forced to either settle for a larger file size, or reduce the quality of your image. The gif is an image that can only use up to 256 colors.

At 256 colors, most images will still look fairly decent, assuming the image doesn’t contain a full spectrum of vivid colors. What’s important, though, is the way a gif is optimized. When you reduce the file size of a gif, you are basically just removing unused colors. If your image has lots of reds and whites, but no blues, the program you use to optimize the image will remove the blues from the image.

To a certain point, you can optimize a gif without ever seeing any visible difference. But, let’s say your image contains a total of 64 colors. If you reduce the image to a 64 color image, you won’t see a bit of difference, but continuing the reduction takes colors out of the actual image and replaces them with neighboring colors.

However, the fewer colors your image has to start, the more worthwhile it will be to choose gif as your file format. If you’re making an icon that is merely a white background with a yellow star, then it would be possible to reduce your image to a mere 5 or 6 colors without seeing any visible quality reduction.

If your image is a picture of your beloved dog, then it uses a great deal more color than the star icon. More importantly, the picture of your dog has gradients. When an image using gradients (for instance, the slow change in skin and hair tones around muzzle or ears as it fades from light reflection to shadow) is reduced using the gif format, you can begin to see lines separating the colors.

Obviously, the jpeg looks 5 times as good, and yet, is only a fraction of the file size of the gif. For these types of images, you can get a jpeg much smaller in file size while retaining a much higher degree of quality. You still should be careful not to optimize too much, however, because jpegs can become blurred when over-reduced.

Based on the examples I’ve shown you, the choice between jpeg and gif should usually be relatively simple. If the image uses few colors, then a gif can be reduced to a much smaller file size. If the image uses a great deal of colors, you’ll have to go with the True Color jpeg in order to conserve the color quality.

But what do we do when an image is borderline? If you can’t decide which file format would be best, then the best thing to do is experiment. I use Fireworks to optimize my images, and it has a image export preview feature which will show you the image, the size, number of colors used, etc., before you save it as a specific file type.

Try it as a gif, reducing the file size until the image quality begins to suffer, and check the file size. Then try the same with the jpeg format. Whichever image is smaller is the one you should use.

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