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Photoshop Tips
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One of the big reasons for using Photoshop is to prepare photos
to be posted on
the web. To do that you need to know just how big your
images are. When you
open an image and it fills a good
portion of the screen the first thing to do is glance
at the
Title Bar (Arrow "A"), if this shows as 20% or less you've got
some work to do.
Go to the Menu Bar, over to Image, down to
Image Size (Arrow "B"), and click once.
See image below.

The Image Size dialog box will show you several things.
Pixel Dimensions (Arrow "A")
is similar to the over all weight of an object. In this
case, 34.9 Mega Pixels is way too
big to post to the web.
The Document Size (Arrow "B") is the actual physical dimensions.
An image can still be fairly large and still not weigh very
much. The Resolution (Arrow "C") is the most misleading as
far as the web is concerned. Although a high resolution is
required for printing, printing and viewing do NOT
require the same standards.
See image below.

Most of the time the Constrain Proportions box (Arrow "A") is
checked. This simply
keeps the over all image in the same proportions as the
original. The first thing I would
change would be the resolution (Arrow "B") down to 72
DPI. If you look closely you
will notice that document size is linked. Simply put; if
you change the width (Arrow "C") for example,
it will automatically change the Height. Notice that even
these two
small changes have a dramatic impact. The Pixel
Dimensions went from almost 35 Megabytes down to a mere 572
Kilobytes (that's less than 1 megabyte.)
See image below.

I like sticking to standard sizes, so I will crop the image to
make it a standard 5x7size. Going over to the toolbar, I
choose the third tool on the left (Arrow "A") and crop my
image down to the 7 inch mark (Arrow "B") so it is more of a
standard size.
See image below.

The last step in getting this image to a useable web size is available in
Photoshop 5.5
and up. Go to the Menu Bar, open File, and then go down
to: "Save for Web".
This is where Photoshop
outshines every product
on the planet. When
you click
on Quality (Arrow "A") a
slider bar will come up
that lets you adjust the compression
even more. In the
full screen image you will see both the original image and the
compressed image side by side so you can see how much
difference it will
make
visually. In our example, we are only compressing it 55%.
See image below.

Notice our original (Arrow "B") went from 529K down to
only 32.57K (Arrow "C").
Go ahead look at the picture as long as you want, can you tell
the difference?? Keep
in mind that our original image was almost 35 Megabytes (35
million bytes) going down
to a mere 32 Kilobytes (32 thousand bytes). That's a HUGE
difference that will still
look GREAT on the Web.
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