Publishing high-quality photos on the internet can be quite the task but with the ever-evolving displays, it’s important that you do. There’s always a compromise between quality and image size that content creators and bloggers need to keep in mind so that their pictures look good without hogging up on their server’s bandwidth.
Naturally, pictures taken from DSLRs and other high-quality cameras are quite bulky. If you were to upload these images straightaway to a website, the loading times would be too high. Therefore, some sort of compression is required.
In this article, we’ll take a step-by-step approach to prepare your high-resolution pictures to be published to the internet.
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Preparing photos for the internet
Step 1: Compressing the source
Before you take the picture, checking the quality of the picture from the camera you’re taking it from is always a good idea. Most DSLR cameras have multiple quality settings that can significantly reduce image size whilst not taking such a big hit to image quality.
Here’s we’ll be taking a look at my DSLR, the Canon 200D Mk1. As you can notice, there are numerous quality settings based on multiple resolutions. Since the images I’m going to take are going to the web, I’ll select S2 here.
What this does is takes the picture in a reduced resolution as compared to the highest possible or even the default settings. These resolutions generally look good on most digital screens, however, your mileage may vary.
Step 2: Compressing the image
Once you’ve got the image ready, now it’s time to run a software compression. If you don’t need to make any changes to the image, you can simply use any online compression service to compress your images. How well do they work depends a lot on your pictures.
If like me you need to process your photos, here’s how. Fire up Photoshop and do whatever changes you need to do. While saving the image, save it in the jpeg format and drop the quality down to ‘3’. You can go even lower or higher depending upon what image size you’re targetting.
And there you have it — a beautiful looking high-res but small size image for the web.
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