Putting LF black and white on the WWW

**Brian Ellis** · 16-Dec-2005, 03:39

I started with the prints, not the negatives. Quality on the web isn't good enough IMHO to justify starting out with the negative and then having to do all the dodging, burning, etc. that was done to make the print. This assumes of course that you already have the prints. I used 500 ppi for the longest side of each image and let the short side fall wherever it fell so that the total file size varied a little but not a whole lot. On most monitors this produces a relatively small image but brings the image up quickly. IMHO if an image downloads very slowly people are too impatient to wait around, they'll just move on to another site.

**Ken Lee** · 16-Dec-2005, 06:07

"What sizes work best, and do you down sample the image before saving as jpg?"

"pay absolutely no attention to dpi, or ppi for web presentation, all that matters is the total number of pixels, or literally pixel width x pixel height of the uploaded image"

In Photoshop, when you re-size an image, you can describe it both ways: in Pixel Dimensions, and Document Size, which includes Resolution, IE ppi.

**Janko Belaj** · 16-Dec-2005, 06:20

Ken, you are messing it up a bit. Document size is connected with printing but not with on-screen dispaly (tv, web, pda...). Pixel Dimensions is what is relevant for this topic.

**Frank Petronio** · 16-Dec-2005, 06:26

Using Image Ready or Photoshop's "Save for Web" strips away some of the header information that get embedded into a jpg file when you just save it as a jpg file. I have mine set to strip away any color profile as well (it's a check box) as I think it is better not to include any profile. The result is a smaller file.

I have downsized large files with long gradiants in one step without banding. Banding or moire will occur when you unluckily match the frequencies of the image and the screen, not because of the numberr of steps you take downsizing. The important thing is to not oversharpen - slightly softer images translate to jpg better.

Downsizing in steps is important for print work where you want to maintain max sharpness. But too much sharpness can work against you with web images.

I just pick the pixel dimensions I want to work with for the image size and could care less about the dpi. In fact, it is almost always wiser to set Photoshop to use Pixels as your default measurement unit and forget about inches or millimeters until the last printing stage.

Many newer websites use 700-800 pixel wide images, which are very nice to view on the majority of screens. I'd still aim to keep the jpg size under 100K but I am less worried about the slow downloads than I used to be because I figure that viewers looking at photos will be more tolerant than a general interest website. And it is surely nice to see a larger image - even if it is more tempting to "thieves". I'll take that tradeoff - seeing big embedded copyright symbols and elaborate anti-piracy warnings are pretty ugly and the people stealing your images are just kids and scum.

One teenage girl blogger linked her homepage background to one of my images, piggybacking off my server no less. So it was an easy matter to change my image into something very uncomplimentary and she quickly changed her page. You can tell if someone is doing this by looking at your web stats.