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Web Page Creation Hints and Resources - Graphics Programs

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• Those which provide drawing facilities.

• Those which provide image manipulation facilities.

The first type of graphics program includes products such as Arts and Letters, Corel Draw, Photo Shop, Print Shop and a number of similar programs. Old versions of these programs are often supplied on the CD-ROM's which appear on the front covers of Internet and computer magazines, although these sometimes have vital features such as saving and printing disabled, or will only operate for a short time.

The second type of graphics program allows graphics images (drawings, photographs, logos, bullets, fancy text in the form of a graphics image and so on) to be altered in several ways, such as:

• Expanding and shrinking.

• Cropping - cutting off unwanted parts of the image.

• Adjustment of the contrast and brightness.

• Adjustment of the colour balance.

• Adjustment of the sharpness of the image (including deliberate distortion effects).

One such program is LView, but there are many similar products. Tucows is an excellent source for this type of software.

Kai's Photo Soap is an excellent more sophisticated program which includes the ability to rotate an image through any number of degrees and also the ability to correct blemishes such as hairs on images.

It might just be worth mentioning a few vital facts about graphics file formats:

• The best format for images with areas of uniform colour (drawings, cartoons, logos, maps, clip-art, etc) is GIF. Using JPG for these images will cause ghosting.

• The GIF format allows transparent images to be created.

• The GIF format allows animated images to be created, but these can take a long time to load and can monopolise the user's computer's resources in order to be displayed. Many of the banner advertisements on commercial sites and search engines are created using animated GIF files, so you probably already know how annoying they can be.

• There is a very useful program called GIF Construction Set which provides facilities for creating transparent and animated GIF files. This program, or one similar to it, is often included on the CD-ROM's given away with Internet magazines. It may also be available online, but I do not have a URL for it. A hunt for its name on any of the major search engines may prove useful. Also try Tucows which is an excellent source for this type of software.

• The best format for photographs is JPG, which compresses files by a very considerable factor. However, JPG is a "lossy" format, meaning that images lose quality slightly, so it is vital to perform all your image editing and processing operations in another format and only convert to JPG at the final stage. It's also an excellent idea to keep your original files in a non-lossy format in case you ever want to start working on them again from scratch.

• In order to retain the quality of photographs, set your computer to operate with the highest possible number of colours. This will prevent banding appearing in areas where colours fade gradually, such as skies. The minimum number of colours for an acceptable colour photograph is 16.7 million, also called True-Color or 24-bit colour. 24 bits gives 2 to the power of 24 possible colours, eight bits each for the red, green and blue components. 2^24 = 16,777,216. 2^8 = 256, hence the range of values of 00 to FF in hex for the values of colours in HTML.

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Most recently modified 25-Mar-01