Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac: The Missing Manual

Chapter 17. Email and the Web

Printing your photos is great, but it costs money, takes time, and doesn’t do much to instantly impress faraway friends. And to many people, printing is just so 20th century. Fortunately, Elements comes packed with tools that make it easy to prep them for emailing or posting on the Web. You can even create simple web galleries.

Note

If you’ve used Elements 6 and you’re wondering where all the menus and buttons for uploading your photos to various online sites for printing and sharing went, they’re gone. But that only adds one extra step to the process of using Elements with various websites: Just save your photos to the desktop, connect to your favorite site, and use their uploading features or iPhoto, Aperture, or any other application that has a direct connection to the service of your choice.

Image Formats and the Web

Back in the Web’s early days, making your graphic files small was important because most Internet connections were as slow as snails. Nowadays, file size isn’t as crucial. The main thing to keep in mind 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 one of the two most popular image formats, JPEG and GIF:

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

  Tip

  JPEGs can’t have transparent areas, ...