Welcome!

[Brsynk]

Hey all
I am new to this forum but I look forward to being an active poster.

I am needing any tricks, tricks, pointers, tutorials, books or site referrals on how to best
optimize photos for the web.

I have a photo website that scales the image proportionally with the browser window within a fluid layout.
so the file needs to be rather large in size (1700px wide)
because of this I really need to get the file size as low as possible for decent loading times.

up to now I have been using the save for web option in Photoshop CS4 and while the results are pretty
good I do see better examples online and I would desperately like to know how to get my photos to look
as good as some that I see.

are there programs better at doing this the PS? (I am on a mac)
is Fireworks any good at such things?

would this be something that a action may be useful for?
(should I condense using a stepped approach like when I am enlarging)

is there a more efficient way to optimize the color palate?

in some cases I see that 80 % of the photo can take a large reduction in size without affecting the quality much
but the other 20% looks awful...

Is there a way to selectively optimize (sorta like masking) or combining 2 optimized versions in to a median?

really any tips would be greatly appreciated.

thanks.

[Andy]

Since you said photos, I'm assuming it's JPEGs.

I'd recommend you download JPEGtran. Also, you usually get the best results if you save bigger images (10K+) as progressive and thumbnails as baseline.

[Brsynk]

yeah, Im using Jpegs, I've been trying to get the images down to about 300K at the most. Does Progressive make the File size smaller, or just loads the image differently?

I've also noticed that websites what have good images, the images often has a max pixel high/width of 800, does anyone else find this to be normal?
Is this how the make a better image by keeping the dimension smaller then increase to quality of the image?

[Andy]

Does Progressive make the File size smaller, or just loads the image differently?

Both.

For the most part anyway. Like said, use progressive when the photos are larger than 10K as that would likely give the smallest file size. Of course, you could always brute force it in JPEGtran, doing both and picking the smaller image.

Is this how the make a better image by keeping the dimension smaller then increase to quality of the image?

Reduce the quality to a level that you feel comfortable with. There's a reason for photos being saved in a lossy format such as JPEG: They do not have to be lossless. With as much colour data that's stored in a photo, no-one would notice any difference if you stripped some away from it.