Welcome to my article about great entertainment images on the Web. In these articles, I try to point you all toward great sites that have lots of entertainment images.
Well, it's been a long time since I covered what beginners should know about images online. Here's a breakdown of the most common image formats on the web.
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, I hope I pointed the way to some great image sources! If you'd like to suggest a cool site, or comments or questions about this article, or anything else, feel free to drop me a line at Creed@bigfoot.com, or if you're a member of Suite 101, post your ideas in the discussion area.
Have a good one!
Creed Stonegate
Go To Page: 1
