cameraAs an artist, images of your work are a major part of your website. Therefore it’s important that you have those images as optimized as possible. Here are some tips to make sure you’re putting your best image forward.

  • Make sure that you start with the best possible images. Photoshop can only do so much. An image that’s already blurry, poorly lit, or small can’t be made to look fabulous through the magic of Photoshop. For some tips on how to get great images of your artwork, you can check out my Photographing Your Artwork roundup post.

  • Avoid putting images with large files sizes on your web. An image that is a megabyte (MB) in size takes some time to load up on a browser and on average, you’ve only got 8 seconds or less before a visitor decides to leave your website. Things that effect the file size of your image includes the actual size (in pixel) of your image, the format, and the resolution. Here’s a detailed explanation on how image resolution and image size can effect the speed of your website.

  • Make sure that your images are no more than 72 dpi in resolution and are either in .gif, .jpg, or .png format before you put them on your website. If your images are photographs of your work, .jpg is the best format. You can check out a previous post I did about image formats for the web to learn more.

  • Make sure that the actual image size and file size of your photographs are the final size that you want on your website. Don’t take a picture from your digital camera that’s 3MB and 3000 x 2000 pixels in size and expect to resize it in Dreamweaver or Expression Web. These programs don’t actually change the image, they only change how the image is displayed on your web page. You need to have a graphics editing program like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or GIMP to resize your images. You can also use online image editors like Splashup, Picnik, and Photoshop Express for some quick resizing jobs.

  • For the best quality images, remember that you should size down rather than size up. If you have an image that’s small, don’t try to enlarge it to make it look bigger. It usually ends up looking fuzzy. Instead, start with a large image and size it down.

  • Make sure that you save your original images when you’re doing any resizing or retouching. Once you save over that image, there’s no going back. This is especially important to remember if you are sizing down an image or saving an image as a .jpg.

  • Avoid saving and resaving .jpg images. The .jpg format is what’s known as a “lossy” image format. That is, the quality of the image degrades a bit every time you save it. If you can, keep your original images in a “lossless” format like .tif or .eps and save your .jpgs from those images.