RE: Why JPGs for screen captures? test results

[Katie Kearns <katie -at- vquill -dot- com>]

If you have a powerful application like photoshop, using different file 
types to manage file size is not the best way of doing things.

Photoshop has, for the past few releases, had a wonderful tool called "Save 
for the Web".  It allows you to tweak the image settings and compare all 
sorts of different settings on the same graphic so you can pick your ideal 
graphic. You can choose to shrink the image, choose from GIF/JPG/PNG/etc., 
limit the number of colors, pick exactly which colors to use, even tell it 
to snap to the "web safe palette". You can do all sorts of great things 
that can maximize the looks of your image while making the image incredibly 
small. You can even experiment on multiple copies of your image (it usually 
shows 4 examples at a time, but you can change that setting) to compare 
between them. It also tells you how big the resulting files will be.

It's every web designers dream come true. ;)

As was previsouly stated, choose GIF vs. JPG based on the type of image. 
Pictures with lots of gradients look good in JPG, while graphics with a lot 
of black or white, straight lines, or just large fields of color look 
better in GIF, just based on their compression mechanisms.

-Katie

At 12:36 PM 2/26/2003 -0500, you wrote: