Presentation/Web start page
Web Construction with FrontPage:
General Issues,
Creating/Opening Locally
Opening "Live",
The Editing Environment/Themes,
Fonts and Text Editing,
Whole-page formatting,
Placing Images,
Tables,
Hyperlinks and Menus,
Website Structure, and Publishing your Site,
Classroom uses

Multimedia on the Web:
The Playing Field
Images
Music and Sound
Video
"Fair Use" and Copyright
Streaming on the Web
Image Sources

Multimedia and PowerPoint:
PowerPoint Animations
Sound and Music
Video

The Web Applied:

Elsewhere on this site:
General Instructional Technology
Presentation/Web
Imaging
Sound
Video,
Home

 
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Images, Music, Movies, and the World Wide Web:

Images

The Resources:

Images from the web risk running afoul of copyright and fair use, and images from your own classroom may compromise your students. Here's a short list of image resources you can use without risk.

The tools:

Good image manipulation programs are a dime a dozen.  Here’s my short list, ranked by my preference (from good to less-than).  For our purposes it matters little which you use (or something else not on this list) – you just have to be happy with it, and it has to do the short list of things we ask of it.  This should include: resizing, color depth changes, format conversions, selecting and changing transparency color.

PaintShop  Pro: Downloadable as shareware, and  about $70 per workstation to  buy.  My favorite!  Easy to use, but quite powerful, and includes many direct controls missing from other programs.

   Adobe PhotoShop: Great, flexible, complex, exacting, expensive ($260+) – it’s what the pros use!

  • Microsoft Image Composer:  Bundled with FrontPage, and hence free if you’re using that (it’s on disk 2).  It does great with texts, but I find it awkward, and it doesn’t give much control over image file size.

  • Microsoft Photo Editor:  Bundled with Office2000.  Very simple, very easy to use, but slim on available controls – again, it doesn’t help much with controlling file size other than some general image quality controls. A basic workhorse, but you’ll grow out of it quickly.

  • Microsoft PhotoDraw:  This is Microsoft’s attempt to bring a good cook-book image program to the masses – it’s awful!  Bundled with Office2000 Premium.

  • Microsoft Paint:  A fabulously easy program to use that, unfortunately, works only in the most bloated of the picture formats. If you or your students produce anything with it, be sure to convert it before putting it on the Web.

The Formats:

For a complete discussion of image file formats, see "Image Formats" under "Images."

The rules:

Here is a list of hints on how to make your Web page images smaller so they will load faster and impact bandwidth less:

Ø      Stick to business! Images are easy on which to go overboard.  If it isn’t related specifically to the subject of the page or the navigation through the website, it’s probably just clutter and you shouldn’t be forcing someone to download it to see your site.  Trash it!

Ø      Size to fit! Larger images make larger files (duh!).  Some adjustment, of course, is inevitable, but if you know your image will occupy a 3” square corner of the screen, don’t save it as a 12” image and resize in FrontPage!

Ø      Don’t use images in the highest quality mode! If you’re printing pictures, you want high quality.  In contrast, computer screens (and their users) are much more tolerant of low-quality images.  Don’t use scanned pictures or digital photographs as-is.  Decrease resolution – you can always “undo” in the software if the results hurt the image.

Ø      Count colors! The larger the color count, the more complex the image, and the larger the file size. If you’re starting from scratch with a banner or other GIF, don’t make the image needlessly complex by using a lot of colors and shading.  If you’re converting or scanning an existing image, count!  Paint Shop Pro will count colors, and will decrease color depth for you.  Experiment - a JPEG will often look goofy in 16 colors, but will be fine in 256.  Scanners and digital cameras save in millions of colors, and that is the JPEG format standard as well.  However, if you decrease the color count before saving, it can greatly decrease file size, often with no discernable penalty to your image!

In general . . . Remember – if (for example) resizing to fit reduces an image file from 54k to 5.4k, it will load ten times faster!