Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual

Saving Images for the Web or Email

If you plan to email your photos or put them up on your Web site, Save For Web is a terrific tool that takes any open image and saves it in a Web friendly format; it also gives you lots of options to help achieve maximum image quality while keeping file size to a minimum. The goal of Save For Web is to create as small a file as you can without compromising the image's onscreen quality.

Save For Web creates smaller JPEG files than you get by merely using Save As, because it strips out the EXIF data, the information about your camera (see Section 2.6.5). To get started with Save For Web, go to File → Save for Web or press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S. The dialog box shown in Figure 15-1 appears.

The most important point to remember when saving images for the Web is that the resolution (measured in pixels per inch, or ppi) is completely irrelevant. All you care about are the image's pixel dimensions, such as 400 x 600. If you have a photo that you've optimized for print, you'll almost certainly need to drastically downsize it. This is easy to do in Save For Web.

Elements gives you a lot of useful tools in Save For Web. In the top-left corner is a Toolbox, featuring the Hand, Zoom, and Eyedropper tools, with a color square below the Eyedropper. The Hand and Zoom work the same way they do elsewhere in Elements. (See Section 3.5.3 for more about the Hand tool and Section 3.5.2 for more about the Zoom tool.)

Below each image preview, you'll see the file size and the ...