> What is the best way to optimize/compress an image for a web page?
Anything non-photographic (or tiny enough) should get indexed and saved either
to png or gif (at indexed pallettes, pngs are usually some bytes smaller). The
pallette does not need to include 256 colors and for web you can usually stick
with much less than that. For my banners, i rarely use more than 32 colors and
for animated ones 16 or less. The trick is to use or not to use dithering.
Dithering quite considerably adds to the filesize, but on colorfades and stuff
like that you really need to have that otherwise you'll end up with two colored
step instead of a fade. Delevopment gimp has three types of dithering, and
enables you to dither to transparent (some might still prefer using semiflatten
instead, the quality is way better, but can be used only on particular
background color shade/tone). Also the Jpeg export is absolutely incredible for
compression settings, since you see realtime, what you do with the settings.
Overall, if you need crisp graphics, use PNG/GIF, if you need color
information, use jpeg. Either case, use GIMP ;)
Jimmac
--
"who's General Failure? And why is he reading my disk?"
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