"Creating images for the Web is a constant struggle to reduce file size."
Photoshop for the Web will teach you how to:
- Turn off previews
- Avoid superfluous colors
- Create a browser-safe color swatch
Once you have your preferences set, you'll be off and running to create great Web graphics, but that's just the first chapter of this book. Chapters two through six detail how to create great photos, GIFs, and JPEG images for use on your Web page.
What you see on your monitor is usually a good approximation of what others will see on theirs.
I love the chapter on laying out pages. When I do pages with lots of images, I like to layout the entire design in Photoshop so that I can see what it will look like. Then I take slices of the page to build a table that will recreate the page in HTML. (It is possible to do this in Macromedia Fireworks and build the HTML right there, but it's hard to learn Fireworks, and I already know Photoshop.)
One of the best things I learned was how to create JPEG images that were really small. Because of the way that JPEGs compress images, if you apply a Gaussian blur over the entire image, it will create a smaller file size when compressed. This is well demonstrated in the full color center photos in the book which detail the same image with different effects to create a smaller file size.
