Handy
Tip: Remember .jpg format is for photographs and .gif format is for animation or cartoon looking images.
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Paint
Shop Pro Tutorial
Web
Graphics Formats. GIF or JPG
This
psp tutorial talks about saving graphics in the GIF or JPEG formats.
When working on images for your Web pages you may wonder when to use JPEG and
when to use GIF.
For many
types of images, GIF is superior in image quality, file size, or both.
One of the first things to learn about the JPEG vs GIF issue, is what
kinds of images to apply them to.
A good guide is that photographs should be saved as
JPG's, while clip art, text and transparencies should be saved as GIF's Black-and-white
images should never be converted to JPEG. You need at least 16 gray levels before
JPEG is useful for gray-scale images. However, GIF is much better for gray-scale
images of up to 256 levels, while JPEG is not. JPEG
has a tough time with images that include sharp edges: a row of black pixels next
to a row of white pixels, for example. Sharp edges tend to come out blurred or
"stepped" unless you use a low compression setting. Sharp edges such as this are
rare in photographs, but are fairly common in GIF files: drawings, text, etc.
The blurriness is usually very obvious with text that is very small in size. If
you have a GIF with a lot of small fonts or text, it's probably best to try to
stay away from JPEG. Because
Jasc Paint Shop Pro requires that an image have a 24-bit color depth (16 million
colors) for many of its operations, the GIF format would not be ideal for saving
original photos, as it can only save with 8-bit color (256 colors). The JPEG format
would also be less than ideal because it each time you save an image in this format,
you will lose some image quality as the JPEG format employs a "lossy" compression
algorithm. In other words, it does a good job of compressing the image because
it loses some of the image quality. If you save a JPEG over and over, the degradation
will quickly become noticeable. If you keep the compression level under 30% and
do not repeatedly save a JPEG as a JPEG, you will not be able to discern loss
of quality under most circumstances. Maintaining
Originals Whether
you are creating a graphic from scratch or working with an existing image, you
will want to save your original images in an optimal format. Many artists prefer
the TIFF format because it uses a lossless form of compression and will
not reduce the color depth to 256 colors as GIF does (lossless compression reduces
file size without losing image quality). When
you are saving TIFF files, use LZW Compression (the default in Paint Shop Pro).
In the "Save As" dialog box, click on "Options". In the TIFF Options
you will be able to specify the dots per inch (dpi) resolution. If you are creating
graphics strictly for the Web, a resolution of 72 or 100 dpi should be adequate.
If
you have Paint Shop Pro 7, you will want to save your master images in the PSP
file format which allows you to save layer information. Like TIFF, The PSP file
format also uses a lossless form of compression. Once
you have the originals safely saved, you use the "Save As" feature and
make a copy in either the GIF or JPG format to use on webpages. Graphics
With Transparency Both
GIF and PNG support transparent backgrounds, while JPEG does not have the ability
to support transparent backgrounds at all. This issue is currently making the
GIF image very popular with Web page creators and designers, while PNG still remains
a rarely used format. After
all is said and done, it really comes down to your personal choice and learning
which format works best for your needs.
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