Working with Images

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How to Prepare Images for the Web

Only use the following two image types on your web pages:
  • jpg
  • gif
The best format for web photographs is jpg, and the best format for web images with large areas of flat color (logos, illustrations, drawings, cartoons) is gif. If you simply export Corel Draw images directly for the web, you will not get good results. However, Corel Photo Paint, which is included in your Corel Draw package, will work quite well. Use PhotoPaint for:
  • photographs saved as jpgs
  • logos and illustrations exported as gifs

Naming your Images

Do not use spaces or punctuation in your image names, except for the dot before the extension (.jpg or .gif). Notice to MAC users: you must include the extension, and you cannot add anything else after it.

If you do use spaces or punctuation in your image names, you may run into trouble. To help avoid trouble, the program will automatically insert an underscore ( _ ) in the place of a space. However, if there are any extra punctuation marks, your images may not display at all.
Getting pictures from your camera

If you have a digital camera, follow the instructions that came with your camera to download the pictures to your computer. Most digital cameras will allow you to save your pictures in jpg format, which is good for web pages.

Buy the best camera your budget can stand, and then use the highest resolution your camera is capable of making. Low-quality jpeg images look distorted and "watery.") Use PhotoPaint, Photoshop, Fireworks or other specialized web graphics program to reduce the file size.

If you take your pictures with a film camera, either scan the processed prints or find a processor who will supply your images in digital form on a disk.

Follow the directions to the left to crop and resize and optimize your pictures for your web site.

Photo Paint Images (Photographs)

1. Open, Scan or Import photos in .tif or .jpg format. There is a Tip Sheet on how to operate your Agfa scanner on ABMarketing.com.

TIP: Tiff is an uncompressed format, so if you have that option, save your originals in .tif format. Since .jpg is a compressed format, when you re-save it, you further compress a compressed image, and you lose a bit of quality every time. The image you will use on your site will be a .jpg but if you also save a .tif copy, you'll have an uncompressed original if you want to make future changes.

2. What Size Should My Pictures Be?

Your corporate logo banner must be 400 pixels wide by 100 pixels high. Here is an example logo that is 400 pixels by 100 pixels — a border has been drawn around it to show you the dimensions. (See About Image Size for a discussion about pixels vs. inches):

If you want a picture to take up the whole width of the content area on the web site, (for example, your corporate logo banner), make it about 450 pixels wide. Here is an image that is 450 pixels by 100 pixels, or about 4-5 inches wide by about 1-1.5 inches high. (See About Image Size for a discussion about pixels vs. inches):

For images suitable for the Events Calendar, make them about 100x100 pixels, like the image below.

For your Photo Gallery page, make the thumbnail images no wider than 160pixels, like the photos below:

  

Click here for more help with sizes on the Photo Gallery page.

There is information about how to use PhotoPaint to resize your images on the Resizing Images in Photopaint page.

For most of your other images, a good size would be about 200x300 pixels, or about 2x3 inches or 4x5 inches (see About Image Size for a discussion about pixels vs inches).

Many digital cameras save images as multiples of 4:3, such as 1280x960 pixels (1.2 megapixels), 640x480 or 320x240.

Here are two images; one is 240w x 320h, the other 320w x 240h, or about 3-4 inches x 2-3 inches.

  

To make your images smaller you resize (Resample) them or crop them.
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