On Apr 23, 2006, at 7:20 PM, William Robb wrote:
If you mean the metadata and the ICC profile, referring to them as
"extraneous junk" is foolish: they're important parts of a digital
capture image, if not essential parts. I like having my copyright
and the correct ICC profile incorporated into the file.
The funny thing about meta data is that it is hidden. You actually
have to go looking for it to find it.
Incorporating things like copyright info that isn't going to be
seen by the casual downloader can be thought of as foolish as well.
Commercial picture vendors, people who publish digital images, are
very aware of metadata and review all pictures to be used to be sure.
Thieves who want to steal your photos will steal them anyway. It's
not foolish to embed the data that can give your photo a verifiable
credential should you be interested in protecting your ownership rights.
My experience with save for web is that it gives a file roughly 25%
or more smaller, and has no effect on viewability of the image.
I just finished a series of tests. My script using Photoshop's own
JPEG algorithm and will all metadata intact produced an excellent
image direct from the full resolution, 16bit PSD example file that
was 100K in final size.
Save for Web would not accept that large an original file to begin
with, which meant that I had to do all the work of resizing,
reduction to 8bit, etc before using it. Then it produced a file, sans
ICC and metadata, that was 15K smaller (85K total). The quality (set
to "65" as Aaron suggested comparable to to Photoshop's 8) had much
more visible artifacts than the Photoshop "6" setting. I then added
the ICC profile and metadata and the file grew by 4K.
Personally, I'll not use Save for Web. I prefer to have the
appropriate metadata in my JPEG files on the web, as well as the ICC.
15K for that, plus better rendering, is not too much.
Godfrey
