[filmscanners] Re: PS sharpening

["Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com>]

Alex writes:

> what would be preferred policy of image
> offering for the public ?  I mean small GIFs
> as thumbnails linked to JPEGs of certain
> resolution of JPEG only approach ?

It depends on your intended audience and the type of connections and
machines you anticipate that they will have.  Designing for unsophisticated
Web surfers with slow connections and small monitors is different from
designing for seasoned surfers with broadband connections and huge monitors.

As a general rule, keep in mind that most people have 800x600 screens in
24-bit color, with dial-up connections of 40 Kbps or so.

Thumbnails are fine, if they are very small (read: highly compressed) and
not too numerous on a single page.  I used to use them, but as the number of
images increased, it started taking a long time just to download the
thumbnails, so I dropped them--but much depends on your site design.

As for full-sized images, something under 800x600 is probably best.  You
need not design for 640x480 monitors--hardly anyone still uses those.  And
"Web-safe" colors or GIFs are a waste of time today--full-color 24-bit JPEGs
are fine (and preferable for photos in any case), and they download faster.

> Also, what would be suitable JPEG resolution
> to be allowed for image download from web
> site achieving two goals: good on-screen image
> quality, optimal size and resolution for fast
> download and not suitable value usage ...

Probably between 640x480 and 780x580 or so.  Most monitors are set to
800x600 today; quite a few are set to 1024x768 as well.  700x500 is a nice
size that still doesn't allow much in the way of printing on paper (although
it can be stolen for other Web use).  Using a lot of compression degrades
images enough to make them difficult to print, too, although it also
influences display quality--high compression speeds downloads, too.

> I thought about something like VGA size (640x480)
> or probably SVGA (800x600), what about resolution ?

Yes, those work.  If by "resolution" you mean DPI, you can forget about
that--DPI is meaningless for Web display.  If you really do wish to set a
DPI, though, set it to 2700 or 4000; if anyone downloads the image as-is and
tries to print it in a word-processing program (a common way of using stolen
images), the high DPI will cause it to reproduce at a very tiny size, and
many people stealing images in this way will not be able to figure out how
to fix that, thereby preventing them from using the stolen image.

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