Image Compression Basics

An adult webmaster resource...

Written by Tom from Tom's Newbie Booster

I should really make that "compression for the BUSY adult webmaster..."

Going back a little, I've been using Jpegs for what seems like a life time now, I quickly realized when I started designing non-adult sites that JPEGs were for photos and GIF's were for graphics. If you've ever tried to compress part of a girl into a GIF - you'll have noticed that it's really hard not to end up with something speckled and pixilated. So JPEGs are the way to go. There are a lot of great tutorials out there on the web that go into JPEGs in depth, but were just gonna look at how to save great porn pics today that won't cost you a fortune in bandwidth.

Alrighty! Let's start with a simple tutorial here on saving a JPEG.

1) Make sure you have this picture somewhere in on your hard disk.

http://www.topniche.com/newbie-booster/resources/compress/uncompressed.jpg

Yuppers, it's the same girl from yesterday, looking sultry as ever. Now, start Windows explorer, go to the folder where you put this image, and then go to VIEW in the top menu and choose DETAILS - you'll see that this image is around 221k in file size. That's going to be way too much. In reality, we want it to be around a tenth of that size. The smaller we can get this picture without it looking too bad, the less we will have to pay when Joe Surfer downloads it.

JPEGs can be set to a compression level of 1 to 100. 1 will be a lovely looking picture, but the file size would be HUGE! A setting of 100 will be the smallest file size, but detail will be severely compromised, and the model in the picture would look like something from a sci-if movie. We're gonna play with this setting to see the effect it has on one of our porn pics...

NOTE: Some graphics packages swap this around to make things more complicated! Sometimes 1 will be the least compression and 100 will be the most. You'll soon find out which system YOUR package uses.

Using Paint shop pro - the free download from yesterday, we're going to compress this picture so that it's a little more bandwidth friendly!

1) Start Paint Shop Pro - the easy bit!

2) Using the FILE menu, open your picture.

3) Let's presume that we've been altering this picture and making it look the way we want, and now it's time to save it. Use the FILE menu and choose SAVE AS.

4) Now then, graphics packages are all different and yet alike. When it comes to saving pictures, there's usually just a simple slider that let's you set the compression level from 1 - 100. In Paint shop pro - you need to now click OPTIONS to bring up this slider.

5) Make sure that the 'standard encoding' box has the black dot in it, and then slide that level up to 80. This is one hell of a compression here!

6) Save this picture as compressed80.jpg

7) Go to Save As again, and then set the compression to 20 and save the picture as compressed20.jpg

Next, there are 2 things we're going to look at - and we're going to look at the 2 most important questions adult webmasters have to ask when they're working with compressing JPEGs.

Does it look OK?
Is the file size small enough?

1st, let's check the sizes. Go back to Windows explorer, and check the file sizes.

The picture that had the we compressed the MOST is now sitting pretty at 14.5kb - that is well under the desired level of 25kb for a free site picture.

The picture that we compressed only a little (to level 20) is now around 45 kb. That's not quite small enough, but is a darn side smaller than when we started.

OK, let's go look at our masterpieces... Open them up in Paint shop pro, and flick between them. Here's my examples...

Level 80 compression 14.5kb:
http://www.topniche.com/newbie-booster/resources/compress/compressed80.jpg

You can see that this picture has had a lot of compression on it and it's starting to look a little rough at the edges! The model's skin is looking pretty blotchy in places, and although you could happily get away with this on a free site - you might want to consider compressing this a little LESS and seeing if you can trade a little file size for a higher quality image.

Level 20 compression 45 kb :
http://www.topniche.com/newbie-booster/resources/compress/compressed20.jpg

There's practically no difference from the first image that we started with here. There's no sings of the odd looking patches that it's overly compressed pal had - BUT that probably means that this image could be compressed somewhat further and save you money in bandwidth.

With that in mind, here's a task for you. See if you can play with the compression and find the 'perfect' level for this image so that it's just under 25kb but doesn't suffer from any ugly distortion at the same time.

Basically, it's all about finding the right BALANCE!

Alrighty, I think that's enough board hogging for one morning LOL! Let me know if you've got any questions on compressing your porn pics, or any tips that you've found useful. Thursday, I'll go on to BATCH compressing, and look at the free programs I'd mentioned to do that.

Have a VERY profitable day everyone!

TOM ^"^

ICQ 12616560
Email tom@tomsnewbiebooster.com