Photoshop Elements 7: The Missing Manual

Chapter 17. Email and the Web

Printing your photos is great, but it costs money, takes time, and doesn’t do much to instantly impress faraway friends. And to many people, printing is just so Twentieth Century. Fortunately, Elements comes packed with tools that make it easy to prep your photos for onscreen viewing, and email them in a variety of crowd-pleasing ways.

Image Formats and the Web

Back in the Web’s early days, making your graphic files small was important, because most Internet connections were as slow as snails. Nowadays, file size isn’t as crucial; your main obligation when creating graphics for the Web is ensuring they’re compatible with the Web browsers people use to view your Web pages. That means you’ll probably want to use either of the two most popular image formats, JPEG or GIF:

• JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts’ Group) is the most popular choice for images with lots of detail, and where you need smooth color transitions. Photos are almost always posted on the Web as JPEGs.

  Tip

  JPEGs can’t have transparent areas, although there’s a workaround for that: Fill the background around your image with the same color as the Web page you want to post it on. The background blends into the Web page, giving the impression that your object is surrounded by transparency. See Figure 17-4 for details on 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 ...