TABLE OF CONTENTS Since the first edition of this book, the World Wide Web has become an even greater part of our daily lives, and as I mentioned then, it is no longer sufficient to concentrate solely on the process of making great prints from digital files, as knowing how to output your pictures so that they are suitable for the web is not just a nice idea, it is now an essential part of the image-making process. In fact, there is a growing band of professional photographers whose work never becomes a print and only ever exists on our screens. Therefore, over the next few pages we will look at the skills you need to become a web-savvy image maker. See Figure 10.1.
As most people access the web through a modem and telephone line the size of the images used for web work is critical. The larger the picture file, the slower it will download to your machine. So preparing your files for Net use is about balancing picture quality and file size. To help with this, two image file formats, JPEG and GIF, were developed to include a compression system that shrinks file sizes to a point where they can be used on a website or attached to emails. See Figure 10.2. The problem with both...
