| I tried the JPG format next. I was able to create an excellent JPG reproduction of my image by turning off subsampling and using a quality setting of 95. As you might have guessed, even though it looked fine, the file size was way too big (over 70K). After the JPG didn't work, I tried PNG. The image looked fine, and the file size was pretty good (about 30K). But, given PNG's incompatibility with 3.x browsers, would Ulead want the page's most important image to be delivered in PNG format ? Probably not. So what do you do when an image needs about 400 colors and you only have 256 colors available ? Slice it up into 2 images. Then, each image can have it's own 256 color palette. That means there's a total of 512 colors available, which was more than enough for this image. I sliced the image into 2 parts using the PhotoImpact Image Slicer, saved each slice using the PhotoImpact Image Optimizer, and the image came out looking exactly like it's true color bitmap original:
I hope you found this article helpful and informative. Next month, in part II of this article, I'll take a closer look at how color is used to create depth perception, lighting and shadows, and 3 dimensional images. |
