Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

428 Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

Saving Images for the

Web or Email

NOTE JPEGs can’t have transparent areas, although there’s a workaround for that: fill the back-

ground around your image with the same color as the Web page you want to post it on. The back-

ground blends into the Web page, giving the impression that your object is surrounded by

transparency. See Figure 17-4 for details about how this trick works.

• GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) are great for images with limited numbers

of colors, like corporate logos and headlines. Text looks much sharper in the

GIF format than it does as a JPEG. GIFs also allow you to keep transparency as

part of your image.

• PNG (Portable Network Graphic) is another Web graphics format that was cre-

ated to overcome some of the disadvantages of JPEGs and GIFs. There’s a lot to

like about PNG files. They can include transparent areas, and the format

reduces the file size of photographs without the loss of data that happens with

JPEG files (see page 57 for more about that). The big drawback to PNG files is

that only newer Web browsers deal with them very well. Older versions of

Internet Explorer are notorious for not supporting the PNG format, so if you’ve

got potential viewers with ancient computers, you probably won’t want to use

PNG.

Elements makes it easy to save your images in any of these formats. You do so by

using the Save For Web dialog ...