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♦ Use software to resize your image. Later in this chapter, I show you how to use free software to change the image to exactly the size you need.

♦ Use a compressed format. Images are almost never used in their native format on the Web because they’re just too large. Several formats have emerged that are useful for working with various types of images. I describe these formats in the section “Choosing an Image Format,” later in this chapter.

If you’re curious how I determined the download speed of these images, it’s pretty easy. The Web Developer toolbar (which I mention in Chapter 3 of this minibook) has a View Speed Report option on the Tools menu that does the job for you.

Introducing IrfanView

IrfanView, by Irfan Skiljan, is a freeware program that can handle your basic image manipulation needs and quite a bit more. I used it for all the screenshots in this book, and I use it as my primary image viewer. A copy is included on the CD-ROM that accompanies this book, or you can get a copy at www.irfanview.net. Of course, you can use any software you want, but if something’s really good and free, it’s a great place to start. In the rest of this chapter, I show you how to do the main image-processing jobs with IrfanView, but you can use any image editor you want.

A Web developer needs to have an image manipulation program to help with all these chores. Like other Web development tools, you can pay quite a bit for an image manipulation tool, but you don’t have to. Your image tool should have at least the following capabilities:

♦ Resizing: Web pages require smaller images than printing on paper. You need a tool that allows you to resize your image to a specific size for Web display.

♦ Saving to different formats: There’s a dizzying number of image formats available, but only three formats work reliably on the Web (which I discuss in the next section). You need a tool that can take images in a wide variety of formats and reliably switch it to a Web-friendly format.

♦ Cropping: You may want only a small part of the original picture. A cropping tool allows you to extract a rectangular region from an image.

♦ Filters: You may find it necessary to modify your image in some way. You may want to reduce red-eye, lighten or darken your image, or adjust the colors. Sometimes, images can be improved with sharpen or blur filters, or more artistic filters, such as canvas or oil-painting tools.

♦ Batch processing: You may have a number of images you want to work with at one time. A batch processing utility can perform an operation on a large number of images at once, as you see later in this chapter.

You may want some other capabilities, too, such as the ability to make composite images, images with transparency, and more powerful effects. You can use commercial tools or the excellent open-source program Gimp, which is included on this book’s CD-ROM. This chapter focuses on IrfanView because it’s simpler, but investigate Gimp (or its cousin GimpShop, for people used to Photoshop) for a more complete and even more powerful tool. I use IrfanView for basic processing, and I use Gimp when I need a little more power. See Book VIII, Chapter 4 for a more complete discussion of Gimp.

Here are a few free alternatives if you want some other great software to try:

♦ XnView: Similar to IrfanView, allows you to preview and modify pictures in hundreds of formats, create thumbnails, and more. It’s available for Mac and Linux. (IrfanView is Windows-only.)

♦ Pixia: A full-blown graphic editor from Japan. Very powerful.

♦ GimpShop: A version of Gimp modified to have menus like Photoshop.

♦ Paint.net: A powerful Windows-only paint program.

Use Google or another search engine to locate any of these programs.

Choosing an Image Format

Almost nobody uses raw images on the Web because they’re just too big and unwieldy. Usually, Web images are compressed to take up less space. All the types of image files you see in the computer world (BMP, JPG, GIF, and so on) are essentially different