Optimising Images for Web - How?

Interested in other people's workflow for optimising underwater digital images for web display.

I've got a pretty good workflow worked out for images to print, but I don't do a lot of web presentation of my images. Interested to here what people here do to their images destined for the web - I've got a few ideas myself, but I'm interested to hear yours!

Hi Rob,

Photoshop's "Save for Web" option is very nice. For photographs (as opposed to a graphic) progressive jpg is my favorite format. The window will tell you the file size for the compression options you've chosen, as well as gives you a preview of the image before and after the compression.

Before Photoshop added this option, I used a program called Graphic Converter which also did an excellent job on jpg images using progressive jpg6. You should be able to find it quite easily online.

Of course there are a hundred other options, but I've found these to work best for me.

Bonnie

Why progressive jpg?

I like this format because it progressively loads the image in several steps, so the web site viewer can see the lower res image right away. As it loads, it fills in the resolution until its fully loaded at full resolution. Sometimes this only takes a fraction of a second, but is more obvious with slow connections or on pages that have a lot of images.

Hi folks, thanks for your thoughts.

I thought I might mention what I'm doing currently with web images.

I flatten the image using Layer - Flatten Image. I don't think this makes any difference, but I do it anyway.

I convert from my working colorspace (adobe RGB) to sRGB (image - mode - convert to profile).

The I use photoshop's Save for Web feature to save a JPEG. Quality level depends on the output. I don't use 'progressive' JPEG setting, by I'll be interested to give it a try given what's mentioned above. I don't attach an ICC profile. I do keep the 'optimised' box ticked.

Then I load the saved file into Internet Explorer to check that it actually does look alright.

I find the web images generally look a bit flat, and I often have to increase saturation and contrast (via levels) to make the web image look like the photoshop original did.

So that's pretty much what I do. It's definitely not rocket science. So does anyone have any other great tips for publishing digital underwater images on the web, or comments/improvements on the above method?