Let's face it, a site without great graphics is one soon to be a mouse click behind you. Content is great, but eyecandy keeps us interested and entertained. I'll mainly be talking about entertainment graphics, but you never know what kind of great stuff I'll find and talk about here.
I'll also cover a couple of programs that will help you to edit or view your images that you've saved from the web.
In this column, I won't be covering adult images, or pirate versions of commercial image editing software, so don't even bother asking.
There are various formats used for images online. Jpegs are mainly used for photographs, and use a kind of compression that loses data (lossy). Gifs are mainly used for line art and can be animated or transparent. Gif compression doesn't lose any image data (lossless). The third kind of image format that isn't as widespread as the others yet is PNG (Portable Network Graphics). PNG has more features than gif files, but some browsers need a plugin to view them.
You may have noticed jpegs that look blurry or have displaced pixels (artifacts). This is most likely a result of overcompression. As I mentioned, jpegs use lossy compression which discards data. In most programs, you can specify how much compression is used on an image. Some web authors overcompress their jpegs so that they load faster. I see this as a mistake, because such files usually aren't worth viewing. I don't complain about somewhat slow download times, as long as the page and its images are good quality. I don't know about you, but I gladly sacrifice a little more of my surfing time to see quality images.
Well that's a start, and in the next column, I'll write about some of the most graphic rich entertainment sites I've been to lately. If you know of a site that has lots of great graphics, let me know and I'll post it here if it's really good.
Now, for the first featured program:
This is the best image editing program, bar none. There are cheaper programs, but they can't touch the power of photoshop. It's a little expensive, but more than worth it. Just add imagination, and you can do anything. Adobe even has a demo version you can download and try out. This is definitely a must have program. The newest version of Photoshop is 5 or higher, but I highly recommend version 4. It's better.
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