(no subject)

[cheekbones3]

Anyone got advice on how to shrink an image without losing detail? I'm finding that the image I'm shrinking loses quality badly in both jpg and gif formats, and I'd really like to make some new icons!

Comments

[r1chard.livejournal.com]

I presume by the way that you've got a new icon that you already fixed this ;)

Just a little FYI for web graphics (not that I'm particularly an expert): 72 dpi is around the resolution of a screen, so generally having resolution any higher doesn't make any difference. JPEG is a lossy format, which means that every time you save it you lose information due to the compression algorithm used. GIF, in the mean time, is an evil evil 256 colour format which was (and may still be) the intellectual property of CompuServe. That is, don't use GIFs. For web graphics I recommend PNG format /except/ where transparency is involved, because there is a render bug in Internet Explorer which makes the transparent area a big grey box (go Microsoft).

You can do a lot worse than using the GIMP for graphics. Avoiding using a lossy format until you are finished sorting out your graphics is also a good way to avoid losing detail. Ever time you save a jpeg is does some funky interpolation across the image, and "smoothes" it a little (to reduce the info it needs to store).

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

Brilliant, cheers. You're correct that I sorted it, and I'll not use gifs any more! Not that I often did anyway...