Image Formats for Artists on the Web
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One of, if not the, most important things that artists want to do on the web is find a way to show their work. You can find homes for images of your work on certain group gallery sites, if you qualify or pay for it. You can apply to the online directories that will allow artists to display work on the directories site. And, of course, many of us develop our own websites which show off a personal virtual gallery of our work. All of this is well and fine, but what images are appropriate? What images can even work? Web browsers are those programs which read the coding of a page and then translate that coding into the visual layout that you see on your monitor. Because there are so very many types of programs that create and modify digital image data, it has been necessary for the browser makers to agree on and limit the file formats which their browsers can read. Those file formats are: J-PEGs (generally seen as .jpg); GIFs (generally seen as .gif); and bitmaps (generally seen as .bmp). What are the differences between these three formats? Bitmaps are the oldest of these three digital image formats. A bitmap "maps" each "bit" of data, or in other words, it separately and individually encodes each singular pixel. As you can imagine, this type of format has very high, detailed resolution of images, but is terribly costly in terms of file size. Because the file sizes (and therefore download times) are so large, bitmaps are very rarely used on the web. Quite simply, none of us want to have to wait three to five minutes for a single web page to download. The GIF format (Graphic Information Format) was developed for use with graphic images. GIFs can read up to 256 colors, so although it can produce some nice images, they are almost always rather flat in color. Cartoon-like, in fact, which makes sense since those are the types of images the format was designed to handle. But people had of course found ways to transfer photographs into digital files. And they then of course wanted to share their photos with the world! Thus, the J-PEG format was born. J-PEGs allow for a much greater number of colors -- up to 16.7 million of them -- but the format also allows for compression of data. In other words, it stores the data in clumps of cohesive colors, not by individual pixels. In addition, many image processing programs allow for further compression, such as through the reduction of the number of colors used. (For example, just in going from a 24-bit image to a 16-bit image, you reduce the number of colors from 16.7 million to 65,536 colors...and therefore much less likely to take up file space.) One of the greatest advantages of J-PEGs is that they can be compressed to reduce wasted file space, but retain the clarity. Of course, the further you compress the image, the more the clarity will suffer. As an artist, you want to carefully balance the clarity of the image and the file size. Quite often if someone is surfing artists' sites or galleries, they are aware that the pages will be image intensive, and therefore take much longer to download. Even so, too long of a wait will drive your audience away. That's why many of us have two images we upload to a site...the thumbnail, and an enlargement, which is usually not only larger in screen size, but also of a much higher resolution. Using this 'preview' style of presentation reduces load time of the page, and tends to be a lot less frustrating for the audience. Be wary, however. Even though the thumbnails are recognized as being a 'sample package' of a sort, thumbnails which are too small won't give the viewer enough information to catch their attention. They're likely to breeze through the thumbnails, without ever really catching a sense of your work or be interested enough to view the enlargement. Ultimately, what matters is that these images give the world a window through which they can view your work. And how wonderful it is that we, as artists, now have such a window available to us -- now we can strut our stuff to the entire world! |