Much of the slowness of a website's downloading is due to the presence of non-optimized graphics. GIF files are often used as designed graphics, since this graphic format offers lossless compression of images. Images that contain large areas of similar colors will compress very well in GIF format, with no loss of image quality. In contrast, JPEG, although it offers superior compression ratios, suffers significant distortion at high compression ratios, especially in images that have areas of high contrast. Below are some images from some common search engines compared to optimized, 216 web "color-safe" GIF files reduced through reduction in the number of colors in Adobe Photoshop. Click here for a tutorial on how to do this.
Theirs |
Mine |
Saving |
||
 |
2330 bytes |
 |
2189 bytes |
6 |
 |
916 bytes |
 |
498 bytes |
46 |
 |
1518 bytes |
 |
751 bytes |
51 |
 |
2643 bytes |
 |
1394 bytes |
47 |
 |
2229 bytes |
 |
1057 bytes |
53 |
 |
5265 bytes |
  |
gif |
39 |
There is a site on the web that will reduce the sizes of your images for free. Check out GIF Lube. This site reduces both GIF and JPEG images (and can convert between the two). The best Windows-based program I have seen for reduction of JPEG images is CyberView Image (demo is available online). This program allows you to rapidly reduce image sizes with real-time display of reduced images. Sliders or numeric entry allow you to change image sizes while comparing their original appearance with the appearance of the reduced image in both 24-bit and 8-bit mode simultaneously. Adobe's ImageReady pales in comparison and costs considerably more.
Last updated 11/17/99