The main purpose for optimizing images for the Web is to lower the download time for your Web pages. We define optimizing as reducing the size of an image file when saving it in a Web format: JPEG or GIF. Adobe Photoshop software makes this process easy. Photoshop contains an extra program called ImageReady. This program is specifically designed to modify and process Web graphics.

The two formats we will discuss are JPEG (Joint Photograhic Experts Group) and GIF (Graphic Interchange Format). JPEG is designed to be used with full-color or gray-scale images of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic artwork or other similar images.

GIF on the other hand, is designed to work well with images with a few distinct colors. Images such as line drawings and simple cartoons or artwork are good candidates for GIF format. Images that have large areas of the same color are compressed very efficiently by GIF. Images with sharp edges also do very well with GIF compression, but not with JPEG.

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