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12/05/2005 02:04:15 AM · #1 |
Hi,
I'm planning a revamp of the picture gallery on my website ( www.paulandcaillie.com ). When I first designed the thing I work around a maximum dimension (height or width) of 400 pixels. The pictures displayed are generated by php to resize their largest dimension to 400 pixels at 100% quality.
Now I feel these are physically too small (especially with more people setting their monitors at higher resolutions). I'm inclined to instead have the maximum dimension at 640 pixels, but am concerned about the impact this will have on the download speed. Many of my audience still use dial-up.
So, the question is, should I comprimise quality? How much can I get away with without loosing too much detail. I notice that many fantstic images on dpc have a dimension of 640 pixels and are around 100kb in size. Is it usual for people to degrage the quality on images submitted to dpc?
Still looking for the courage and the right challenge to make my first submission.
Thanks.
Paul. |
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12/05/2005 02:11:15 AM · #2 |
I think it's more important to focus on the layout of the site rather than the size of the end photo. By that I mean make the page, thumbnails and other page elements fast loading. People will wait a bit longer for an image they really want to see.
As for the final image they click to see there shouldn't be much weight. For most images there isn't a perceptable difference between an image saved at 60-70% quality and one at 100%. |
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12/05/2005 02:11:15 AM · #3 |
In my experience, jpg compression is hardly noticable at anything around 75% compression or less. I would say go ahead and make the max dimension bigger and compromise just a bit of image quality.
If you're using photoshop, just use "save for web" and find a happy medium between file size and compression. You could definitely get some good-looking photos at 640 pixels at around 100 kb.
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12/05/2005 02:14:44 AM · #4 |
Most of the serious shooters use "save for web" in PS and peg the image at just under 150Kb. Depending on the image, this may or may not make a difference. On my images that have a lot of black background, for example, I frequently see a quality level of 95 or 97 in save-for-web at 150Kb. Contrariwise, on very detailed images the quality may drop to to the low 80's.
On these detailed images, if I save one for web at 83 quality and then save another copy in PS at lowest possible compression, and view them at actual pixels size, the difference is not all that noticeable. It's there, but it takes a good eye to see it.
An option for your website is to use that whatchamacallit feature (the name escapes me) where the image loads in low resolution and then reloads itself, "scanning" as it goes, to the higher quality.
100Kb on a 640-piuxel, detailed image may not be good enough to showcase your fine photography, but perfectly adequate if you're just showing images of "things". So it all depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
R. |
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12/05/2005 02:29:58 AM · #5 |
If you are loading one image on a web page.. your users (even those with dialup) aren't gonna to notice a differnece between the speeds of loading 80% or 100%... go ahead and go for the quality. Even dialup speeds are acceptible to DL a 300kb image.
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12/05/2005 02:34:42 AM · #6 |
Thanks for the input. I think I'll increase the max dimension to 640 px, and experiment with quality. I need to be driven by the quality setting rather then bytes because the resized pictures are generated by my code (I'm far too lazy to resize and create thumbs for each shot I upload).
The site itself is pretty efficicient. Once browsing an album it only refreshes the image (and a few image dependant navigation tools). I'm rather pleased with it.
Now to start thinking about the new layout. I'll have to incorporate the larger images somehow. It's the asthetics that I am most eager to update. Any idea's on the best color as a background to display pictures(assume a 1 px black border).
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12/05/2005 02:38:43 AM · #7 |
Originally posted by fotomann_forever:
If you are loading one image on a web page.. your users (even those with dialup) aren't gonna to notice a differnece between the speeds of loading 80% or 100%... go ahead and go for the quality. Even dialup speeds are acceptible to DL a 300kb image. |
I tend to disagree. The visible quality differences in a 300kb and a 100kb image are so trivial that it's almost impossible to tell the difference on most photos. Like Robert said, it takes a trained eye.
I'm on dial-up and, for me, a 300kb image would take quite a while to load (around 20 seconds). I don't think it would be worth it to use 100% quality.
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12/05/2005 02:45:42 AM · #8 |
Originally posted by PaulE:
Any idea's on the best color as a background to display pictures(assume a 1 px black border). |
I like a neutral, Zone IV gray; about the same tonality as the "thread" bar at the top of this page.
R. |
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12/05/2005 02:50:54 AM · #9 |
Until almost everyone in your target audience is on cable or DSL, I'd go with lower quality images. File size 640 is great. That's what I use on my site. I have over 9000 images on my site (yes, that's a lot, I know). They are around 45K or less. Very few are over 75K. Save for Web allows me to see if they are 'acceptable' to me to show on my site. Good luck! :)
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