I'm trying to use photoshop to do some basic image editing and i have an image that needs to be a max size of 10K and in either jpg or gif format but i can't get it lower than 22k. Its only a black background with some text and its about as simple as you can get but i just don't know how to get it any lower in size. I'd appreciate any help.
Make sure you use a paint program that can alter the quality and smoothing of the image. In GIMP after you Save As, change to .JPG, export it click the advanced options, click Optimize, drag quality down as low as you want and try to use smoothing to blur the edges (or anti-alias the image...), change sub sampling, the program tells you how big the image will be so you can play around until it's as small as you can get away with.
Saving the image as a jpg in photoshop i set the file quality to as low as can go which would have been fine for the image quality but it was still not small enough in size.
Try irfanview - that usually does a pretty good job for me, when I want to resize/reduce images for the web.
Is there any color in the image ? You could change the color profile of the image to grayscale, or even duotone (true black and white) and drop the size dramatically.
I never use irfanview other than for viewing images so didn't actually know that i could use to resize pics and whatever else it may be able to do.
You're better off using GIF for text than JPEG. The way JPEG compresses the image will leave the text looking jagged, more often than not. The best was to reduce a picture's file size is to scale the image down.
as retro said use gif or perhaps png (depending on which manage to compress the image best) for quality.
If it is just a black background with text you should be able to drop it to 256 colors and then save it as a GIF. Depending on the content of the image you might get a better result out of saving it as PNG after you drop the palette to 256 colors, but most likely not. Out of curiosity, what are the dimensions of the image?
Managed to get it down in size enough by messing arround with settings in Irfanview, i'm sure i made it black and white or something like that and it was eventually small enough. The actual image had to be 375x50 pixels and 10k in size and all i had was simple text on a black background unlike the template image which was coloured and more complex but its all fine now anyway. Cheers for all the help.
