#How to compress picture size how to#

GIF images are limited to 256 colors, but you can set a lower color depth for substantial savings in file size. The traditional choice of file type for graphics consisting of simple areas and few colors is GIF, although one can now achieve the same results with a PNG-8 (and at a smaller file size). It’s always better to go back to your original, uncompressed file. That’s like making photocopies of photocopies. The one thing you definitely don’t want to do is save your only copy of a file as a compressed JPG, reopen it to edit, and save it out again as a JPG. That gives you both the compressed JPG to use on the Web and your original uncompressed file that you can use again later. If you think that you’ll ever want to use the same photo again, make sure you save your original in a format like TIFF or PSD and then just export the file to JPG. Every time you save a file as a JPG, you lose quality. In this example, we end up with a slightly more artistic photo where the focus remains properly on the flower itself and also achieve significant savings in file size. The photo below was exported to JPG at the same 60% quality setting as above and is only 54 KB-a savings of about 30% of the file size so it will load much faster. If we take that same image, select the background in an image editing program like Photoshop, and then blur the selection, only the background will blur and the flower will remain sharp. The file size is 77 KB when compressed at 60% quality. Below is a photo of a day lily with a busy background. You can even blur just parts of an image and achieve file savings. That’s a perfect case for using a blurred photo. Perhaps you intend to use a photo as a background image. An image with fewer sharp edges and crisp details will compress much smaller. Sample photo from FCIT’s collection of stock plant photos on the ClipPix ETC website.Īnother way to save file size with JPG is to slightly blur the image before you compress it. The blockiness of extreme JPG compress in very obvious. And five times faster to load than the original. But let’s see if we can compress it further.Įven at 60% most people wouldn’t notice any difference from the 100% setting and since it’s a quarter the size, it would load four times as fast.įor many general uses, even this 40% quality image would be acceptable. The 80% setting is virtually indistinguishable from the 100% setting. The image below was exported at 100% quality. Let’s take a slice of a flower photo and export it out at six different quality settings. If you are posting a flower photo just to celebrate the arrival of spring, then a much lower quality would probably be fine. If you are posting a flower photo to a botanical encyclopedia website, you probably want it to be fairly high quality so small distinguishing details can be clearly seen. Always keep in mind what the purpose of the graphic is. When you hit a quality level that is unsatisfactory, then back up to the lowest level that was still good enough for your purposes. If the reduced level looks good enough, then try another reduction. One strategy for selecting the best level is to start with a fairly high quality setting and if it looks OK, try reducing the quality a bit. You should always select the lowest quality that is still suitable for your purpose. Or you might be asked to select a percentage from 0% (lowest quality) to 100% (highest quality). You might be given a number range, for example 0 (lowest quality) to 12 (highest quality).

You might just see a few choices like: low, medium, high, or maximum. When you export to JPG from an image editing program, you’ll be prompted to select the quality level you want. It’s easiest to compress a JPG (also called JPEG) because there’s just one thing to consider: quality. For information about compressing PNGs or GIFs, please scroll down this page.

#How to compress picture size how to#

We’ll take a look at how to get the best compression in each of the three file types starting with JPEGs. If you have a simple graphic with few colors and solid areas, then your best choice will be a GIF or PNG-8. If a similar photo needs to have lossless compression or transparent areas, then a PNG-24 will be required. If your image is a photo with lots of colors or an illustration with gradations and you want to squeeze the file size down, JPEG will probably be your best choice. The more compression, the smaller the file will be and the faster it will load on a webpage.īut first, you’ll need to decide which of the three file formats you want to use. In most image editing applications this is done by the selections you make in the “Save As” or “Export As” dialog box when saving a PNG, JPG, or GIF. The primary way to reduce the file size of an image is by increasing the amount of compression.