Paint Shop Pro 7 Tutorial: Image Compression

This teaches you how to change image types and compress them in PSP7. Basically, this is about saving the images in the best way. You can't simply press the save button, because it would save as a PSP file that can only open in PSP and isn't viewable by browsers. That, and, it takes up tons of space. So here's how to save your final images so that they are viewable by others and you can save space.

You have a finished image open that you want to save. All right. Go to the top and click on File > Export > [one of three options with blue arrows next to them: JPEG, GIF, or PNG]. Okay, so going over the options one by one:

JPEG: If you use this form, your image will turn out as an image.jpg type. The advantages of this is that it's usually relatively quick to load, and it doesn't look overly too bad unless you edit and keep saving it a lot. The disadvantages is that sometimes it can compress the image too much and make your text look ugly. But most of the time, you can prevent that. It's probably the most common type of images used in webdesign now. To use it, just choose the JPEG Optimizer options. A box will pop up. There will be three tabs on the box. You usually wouldn't have to worry about the format or download times box too much, though feel free to look at them. What's important to do here is to look at the Quality tab.

Under it, you'll see that you'll be able to plug in a number in a blank for the compression value of the image. With a compression value of one, the image is virtually unaltered, but it takes up a lot of space and takes a longer time to load. With a compression value of 100, the image looks like crap, but it loads very quickly and doesn't take up a lot of space. Play around with it - sometimes a compression value of ten looks no different from a compression value of one. I suggest that you never go any higher than 15, or it'll really start looking like crap. You can check if the image looks like crap with each compression value by looking at the two little windows at the top. The one on the left shows the image you have at the moment, and the one on the right shows the image after you've put it in JPG form and compressed it. If the one on the right doesn't look like crap with a compression value of 10, then keep it that way. After you're done, just click Okay at the bottom and save it.

GIF: If you choose this, the image will save as an image.gif - the advantages to using a GIF is that they're one of the more quick-to-load image types, plus, if you know how to use an animation program like Animation Shop Pro, you can use gifs for animations. Also, you can make parts of GIFs transparent, which you can't do with most other types. The disadvantage is that GIF image only has 256 colors in it, max. And most images contain more than 256 colors, so your image might turn out to look a bit crappy or speckled.

Okay, so about the tabs at the top: the Format and Download Times tab is pretty useless. Let's start with Colors. In the tab, it asks you how many colors you want. Usually you want to put 256, the max. If you know you have less colors than that, you can decrease it to save space and image loading times. The dithering should be at 100%. The method of color selection is usually best at Optimized Median Cut.

PNG: PNG is the one of the three types I describe that allows for the least amount of image compression. Sometimes, when you have a really busy image or a lot of small text on the image, even using at JPG at a compression value of one makes it change colors and look ugly. And you can only have 255 colors max with GIFs. With PNG, it'll look virtually the same. It's also, most of the time, the largest file size of the three.

The key to making a PNG smaller in size and quicker to load than it usually is is the colors. If you make the image to have a 32k colors rather than 64k, which is what PSP7 is initially set at, then the PNG image will usually decrease dramatically in size, with pretty much no sacrifice in the look.

To change the color depth, go up to the very top and click Colors > Decrease Color Depth > 32k Colors (24 Bit) > Reduction Method Nearest Color (well, it's debateable. Choose whichever way you want.) > Click Okay. If you know your image has even less colors than that, you can experiment with trying to reduce the colors even further. Okay, so now that your image is 32K instead of 64K, just go and export it as a PNG. You don't really need to touch any of the options.

Alright, that's all of this tutorial. Hopefully, you've learned how to save images and how to compress them.

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