How to Optimize Digital Photos For The Internet In Adobe Photoshop

In Adobe Photoshop it is easy to optimize images for use on the internet. Digital photographs are found on nearly every website. A good digital camera produces an image that is very large and at 300dpi (dots per inch). While physical size varies greatly for each image, a picure only needs 72dpi for effective web viewing. Below you will find steps to convert your digital photographs for optimal use on the internet. This Adobe Photoshop tutorial will show you how.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Digital photographs
• Adobe Photoshop

1. Start Adobe Photoshop and open the picture of choice. Once Photoshop is running, go to File-Open and navigate to the image you want to optimize.

2. 
    
   View Actual Pixels

   Go to View - Actual Pixels from the file menu at the top. Usually this is very large and will more than fill up the screen. We will be better able to see the optimization process though, if you see the image at its actual size.

3. 
    
   Image size options

   Change this photo to 72dpi for internet use. From the menu at the top of Adobe Photoshop, go to Image - Image Size. Change the Resolution from 300 to 72. Make sure to uncheck Resample Image. In the example image, this changed the file size from 909kb at 300dpi to 111kb at 72 dpi, yet there is no visible difference in the two images on screen.

4. Now that the image is changed from 72 dpi, it is ready for internet use. It can be resized to any dimensions and manipulated in any way necessary.

Tips & Warnings

• This should be the first step to preparing an image for use online before any other manipulation is done.
• Always use the "Save As" option in Adobe Photoshop and giving it a different name to avoid overwriting your original image.

Resources

• The Digital Photography Book
• Photoshop CS4 Down & Dirty Tricks

[PhiMcRee]

on 6/21/2009 Fuzziness is usually caused by resizing an image. It can always happen, but definitely will happen if you try to make a small image larger.

[MarlaineMarie]

on 6/19/2009 What has caused so many of the eHow writer's main pics to be so out of focus? How can they fix it? Would make a good article for them.