Saving Images For The Web? Keeping True Colors?

[JoshuaTheJames]

Can anyone tell me how to keep the orginal colors of a piece when saving for the web?

thanks,
-Joshua

[retro]

jpeg imho supports 16.7 million colours, which should be sufficient. but i have this strange feeling you know that yourself, so whats the real problem?

[Fipse]

Hi Joshua,

what you´re talking about ist the problem of colour-management. As an Art Director and Producer this is the main problem I´m working with all the time. At least you can produce directly for the viewer on the other side and don´t have to get the stuff printed. THIS will bring you to real PITA´s.

All you can do is minimizing the possibilities of wrong colours by trying to assure at least on your side that the pictures are o.k. What other people see on their monitors is a complete other thing. I know that a lot of people - even professionals - are working with uncalibrated or badly calibrated monitors and so what they will see, when you´re posting a completely "right" picture in the web is maybe crap. Bad luck, but you haven´t got any better chance.

If you want to do it the professional way you´ve got to get yourself a selfcalibrating monitor. I think here in Germany cheap ones - like the LaCie 21"-monitors will cost with the calibrating device about 2.000 Euro (quite the same in Dollar), the cheapest Barco-Monitor (the "Personal calibrator") will cost about 3.500 Euro.

Next thing to have is Photoshop - and no cheap picture manipulating programs. Even a cheap scanner can produce good results with a good picture manipulating program and a good monitor. In Photoshop you´ve got the possibilities to see the scan and the picture you want to publish in the web side by side, so you can exactly choose your compression.

Hope this could help you a little - I´m working with this stuff all the day and so often have with customers who don´t understand the difficulties of colour management.

Fipse

[JoshuaTheJames]

i'm using photoshop...

...its just a fact that when you Optimize for the web... your colors get washed out when you put it on the web.

there has got to be a way to keep your original vibrant colors.

-Joshua

[John P.]

Huh? Strange - I never save using the Save for web option...

When I tried it just now, it made it into a 256 colour indexed image(for making it into a GIF). No wonder your graphics don't look good then?

When I save an image, I almost exclusively use jpeg, and just save it at a KB size I think people won't have a problem downloading(or won't be mad at 'cause it's too big).

Or have I misunderstood what you meant by "Optimize for web"?

[gekitsu]

when being in the save for web menu (john, you can save as jpg, too in that dialogue), you can choose to display the image as "optimized". afaik, it uses a browser (that you can choose, too if you have ie and mozilla or opera etc...) exe to display the image.

[John P.]

Ooops, sorry - since I just save my jpegs and use the slider there to see how big it's gonna be, I haven't used the Save for web thing before.
I didn't see that the GIF option was part of a dropdown menu.

You could try to save it like I do, and see if there's a difference between the two, colour wise I mean?

Unless you're bothered by jpeg compression artifacts. I hate it. Not talking about the serious, square artifacts you get when compressing really much, but just the subtle changes in the quality with normal compression. So I compress my images as little as possible. When I see the first hint of compression, I usually save it at that setting, or a bit higher.

Unless of course that results in a too large file.

[gekitsu]

as for compression artifacts, you could also try png24. it#s basically lossless 24 bit compression and by lossless, i mean lossless. the same picture information as in the tif file you use for printing issues but at reasonably smaller size.
still, png24 is quite heavy.

for work that has a countable amount of colors and shades (pencil drawings, pics with a limited palette) i favor png8. it's basically like gif, 256 indexed colors but in less filesize.
you will retain all your edges crisp as they belong, since there is no 8x8 px rasterization process like in jpg.
things like pure monochrome pencil drawings -or their digital counterpart- work well with 16 colors. you usually don't even notice a difference until you zoom in at a few hundred percent.
with special palette options like grayscale for pencil, inks or simply b/w drawings/paintings, you will save even more file size.
for things with "true" colors in them (also things like cool gray markers, since they are blueich and lose all of their impact when put back to neutral grayscale), snap to web is a good option. it's like an algoithm that approximates your palette to use as much "web" colors as possible, saving file size, too.

quality vs. size wise, nothing beats png24, though. you end up having over 100kb quickly but just imagine what the same thing in tif or bmp (=totally uncompressed) would weigh in.