Optimising Images for the Web Preparing images for display on the web is a handy trick. Unfortunately GIMP has no 'save for the web' feature similar to this very nice function in Adobe Photoshop. However, if you know a little about your image and what you want to do with it, then its easy to optimise images for the web using GIMP. The magic in this process is really knowing what format to use and what settings for that format will give you the best results. There are a few questions you must first ask yourself. Is file size important? If your audience has access to fast internet connections then you don't really need to optimise images. Save for web is one of the best GIMP plugins for multiple tasks. It let us control almost every part of pictures where we can crop the image, change the format, reduction, compress, scale, sharpness etc. GIMP is a awesome image editor, but more functionality can be achieved by adding some plugins to it. Image optimization can be huge pain sometimes if you have to optimize your image for your. This might be the case, for example, if you are putting images on an internal network (eg. An intranet). In this case you just want a high quality image that will be displayed in a browser, but you don't really care about file size as the internal network is faster than any internet connection you will ever have. So save the images in PNG. If this is the case you don't need to read any further, just use PNG. If however, you know who your audience is, and they have fast internet connections, or you don't know who your audience is (ie. They are just 'anyone online') then you need to be careful about file size. Weather channel app for mac. If you are in this position then you need to read on to determine which is the best format and process to use to optimise your images. Is the image the right height and width? Office 365 university download with key. The first thing you must ask yourself is 'is the image the right height and width?' This is the main factor in determining file size. ![]() The bigger your image is the bigger the file size. So, make sure your image is the same dimensions as will be used on your webpage. If, for example, you are to display an image in a webpage which is (for example) 400 pixels x 267 pixels, then you should make sure your image is exactly that size. How do you know the dimensions? Easy.GIMP tells you.with the image open in front of you choose 'View' and then click on 'Info Window': You should see a window appear like so: You can see here that the image is 600 pixels x 400 pixels. In this example I want the image to be 400 x 267 pixels so I need to scale the image to the smaller size. ![]() To do this I click on 'Image' and then on 'Scale Image': I will now see a window like this: Now we can re-scale the image by typing the dimensions we want directly into the 'Width' box: In the above example I have typed in '400' in the 'Width' box. The 'Height' has remained unchanged, however GIMP will keep the proportions the same. If you see the 'chain' icon: this means that if you change one value in either the Height or Width boxes, the other value will change automatically to retain the same image proportions. However, in the above example this did not happen. Because you need to press the 'Enter' key on your keyboard or click somewhere else on the window so GIMP knows you have finished, and it will automatically set the other value proportionally. So if I press 'Enter' I will get this: How many colours does your image have? If you need to optimise the file size for better delivery over the internet (see the point above), then your choice of format comes down to what type of image you wish to display. Lets start with the simplest decision. If your image has less than 256 colours, use GIF. This is because GIF does a very good job of reducing file sizes for images with 256 colours or less. The question you might be asking yourself is 'how do I know how many colours my image has?' With GIMP this is easy, you must first have the image open like so: Now click on 'Layer' in the top menu, slide down to 'colors' and click on the 'Color Cube Analysis': You will see a info window appear that will look something like this: You can see the above information says 'Number of unique colors: 256'. Great, this image is ideal for saving as a GIF. There might be an exception to this: if your image contains a lot of gradients (colors that change gradually) then you might be better using JPEG. Photos, for example, are probably better saved as a JPEG.
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