OK here goes...i thought i crank out a usefull post after all the "i'd hit britney with my ars sig" threads day in day out.
What do i have for you..a lesson in bandwidth saving..or image optimization for that matter.
For all of you posting galleries or for all noobs why freshly cranked out a site in photoshop it's to to optimize..
When you cut you images try to seperate single (low color) parts/text with images containing loads of colors (persons)
The low color parts are best to be saved as gif files and the high color parts as jpg's. Low color gifs are smaller in size and look much sharper than over optimized jpegs wich tend to become blurry.
I have a few samples wich i would like to show first
This is a random (let's pretend shall we) image from a gallery
saved and optimized as a jpg file
6.1 kb in size
The gif version at 6.8kb / 128 colors
Gif version at 4.4kb / 32 colors
You saved 2.2 kb right therewith a single image in a few seconds
There's almost no quality loss by converting it to 32 colors
Next :
jpg / 7.7kb
Here's an image that's optimized as a jpg. The top part is text,
bottom image only. Let's cut in in 2
Top part - Gif / 3.7kb
bottom part - jpg / 1.9kb
Total saved 2.1kb
This sounds like bullshit..saving a few kb..but if you own a tgp and you can optimize your logo byt cutting it in a few pieces or optimize your gallery and save 15kb/20kb it will save you a few bucks
Let's do the match
Let's say we get 100k traffic at the front pages of our tgp/galleries and we can save a total of 30kb on the normal graphics. I'm not even talking about optimizing thumbs, large images and stripping down 44khz stereo sound to 22khz mono
(15% save right there)
100.000 x 30kb / 1024 (to mb) / 1024 (to gig) = 2.8gig
times 30 = 84gig
times $0,50 overusage = $42 bucks for 10 minutes work
Saving money is earning money...it might be a small amount to most of you but i've seen design i could hammer down a whopping 40% in size..
Before i forget..macromedia fireworks is a great tool for optimzing images since you have a great preview tool in wich you can follow the process. It might not be the cheapest but try the trial and see if you like it.
It's not a batch thumb optimizer (can be used for it though) but it's far more advanced.
Hope this post was at least a bit usefull..till next time if i can find a good topic that is
