Photoshop Elements 11: The Missing Manual

Chapter 17. Email and the Web

Printing photos is great, but it costs money, takes time, and doesn’t do much to instantly impress your faraway friends. And to many people, printing is just so 20th century. Fortunately, Elements comes packed with tools that make it easy to prep your photos for onscreen viewing and to email them in a variety of crowd-pleasing ways.

Image Formats and the Web

Back in the Web’s early days, making graphic files small was important because most Internet connections were as slow as snails. Nowadays, file size isn’t as crucial; your main obligation when creating graphics for the Web is ensuring they’re compatible with the web browsers people use to view them. That means you’ll probably want to use either of the two most popular image formats, JPEG or GIF, though PNG is also an option:

• JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts’ Group) is the most popular choice for images with lots of details, and where you need smooth color transitions. Photos are almost always posted on the Web as JPEGs.

  Tip

  JPEGs can’t have transparent areas, although there’s a workaround for that: Fill the background around the image with the same color as the web page you want to post it on. That way, the background blends into the web page, giving the impression that the object is surrounded by transparency. See Figure 17-4 (Save for Web File Format Options) for details on this trick.

• GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) files are great for images with limited numbers of colors, like corporate logos and ...