[Techtalk] Website Building Program For Dummies (me)

[Akkana]

mia at miaridge.com writes:
> I mean 'reduce jpgs/gifs/pngs to the smallest possible file size while
> retaining as much image quality as possible'.  

The gimp has sliders for image quality when I save as a jpeg, so
I can reduce the file size that way, and it shows me the file size
right above the slider.  What does photoshop do that's better?
Adding things to gimp is fairly easy, so if there's something it
could be doing better, I bet it wouldn't be too difficult.

The png save dialog has a slider for compression level, but it doesn't
show the file size in the dialog.  I wonder if there's a bug filed
on that already?  I don't know what optimizations are available for
gif (does gif have a compression option?) but I can save interlaced
if I want to.

> When you consider that most web developers try to keep the total 'weight'
> of a page below 50k, image optimisation becomes really important.  

Ha, I wish more web developers worried about such things!
Doesn't seem like it from some of the pages I come across.
Thank you for caring about it, anyway!

> I also find that the Gimp's text handling tools, filters and other tools
> (auto levels, smudge, etc etc) aren't as configurable as Photoshop's and
> don't yet produce results with the same quality.

I highly recommend the gimp-freetype plugin (available at gimp.org). 
It lets you scale and rotate text, and it can see all your truetype fonts
even if you haven't set up your X server to see them.  Lots of gimp
developers like "Dynamic Text" (doubleclick on the T in the toolbox to
get tool options, and there's a checkbox there for dynamic) but I can't
say much about it myself because I always end up using gimp-freetype.

About auto levels: I have a patch submitted in a gimp bug (my first
submitted gimp patch!) that will make gimp's levels tool more
configurable than Photoshop's, if I can just persuade one of the
developers to check it in. :-)  My understanding was that the 
current gimp dialog looked almost exactly like photoshop's -- no?

	...Akkana