In the absence of other concerns, I'm probably a lot fussier than many about these things. I get very distressed by colour smearing, or block blotchiness in areas supposed to be smooth transitions of colour, and, especially, the little "wrinkly" artifacts that show up near high contrast edges in an image. This, of course, makes me rather critical of over-compressed JPEG files. So I come to graphics compression and optimisation with a photographer's preoccupation for sharpness, colour fidelity, and a hatred of stray marks, spots etc on an image. In my youth I devoted a good deal of time to photography (I still do when I can). Perhaps I should also say a word or two about what I look for in programs that optimise JPEGs and GIFs.įirst, JPEGs. And I've not yet subjected all my graphics to the programs I found, that will come in due course.
For the record, I started out looking for a program that would do a good job compressing the graphics on my own Web pages. What I will recount is what I think about the programs, for my own purposes. I'm not going to tell you what the best program is, because that depends on your own tastes and what you want to achieve. It's merely an account of my explorations and opinions. Needless to say, the work here reflects my own personal views, and should not in any way be taken to construe fitness or otherwise of any piece of software for any particular purpose.
Usually the filter type plugins work with both, but the export plugins work only with Photoshop.
#Image file size reducer software reviews pro#
I've been testing the applications as plugins for Adobe Photoshop 4.0 and PaintShop Pro 4.1, as well as stand alone applications. There are two of these programs I've found so far. The second type is a program that generates synthetic palettes using the limited 256 colour palete available to VGA graphics cards. The main type is the program that takes an image file - JPEG or GIF - and compresses it as much as possible without unduly distorting it, while taking into account the colour display limitations of some browser/PC combinations. There are two sorts of programs I've found on my travels. So hopefully the reviews will be of general interest. I've concentrated on Windows95 software, but in most cases what is available for Win95/NT is also available for the Mac. They are directed at the small stand-alone applications and graphics program plugins, not the graphics programs themselves. So the reviews in these pages are the result of my own investigations. At best the current on-line reviews seem to tackle one or two packages, which makes comparison tricky. Even finding the information is difficult. I've found no single source of information on all the different programs available to do the job. So a small industry has grown up in the last two years for add-ons to the main graphics software applications, principally Photoshop, to provide greater control over the size of graphic images destined for the Web. But the Web is a very different matter: file size is just as important as image quality. Generally in the print industry, the objective is the best image quality and image size is nearly irrelevant. But programs designed for use in the print medium usually have not been optimised for minimum image size. Most graphics generation programs like Photoshop and PaintShop Pro allow some degree of control over image compression, be the file a GIF or a JPEG. These pages are intended as a review of the software that is available to do this work. So it makes plenty of sense for Web page designers to minimise the size of the graphics images they use.
#Image file size reducer software reviews download#
If you're visiting this website over a slow link you will know that graphics can take a long time to download at times. Since then, I've also updated some of the reviews: Here until I could get things better organised. Web graphics compression software - a guideĪs these pages hadn't been updated for several months, I wrote some new stuff
0 kommentar(er)
