Printing photos is great, but it costs money, takes time, and doesn’t do much to instantly impress your faraway friends. And to many people, printing is just so 20th century. Fortunately, Elements comes packed with tools that make it easy to prep your photos for onscreen viewing and to email them in a variety of crowd-pleasing ways.
Back in the Web’s early days, making graphic files small was important because most Internet connections were as slow as snails. Nowadays, file size isn’t as crucial; your main obligation when creating graphics for the Web is ensuring they’re compatible with the web browsers people use to view them. That means you’ll probably want to use either of the two most popular image formats, JPEG or GIF, though PNG is also an option:
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts’ Group) is the most popular choice for images with lots of detail, and where you need smooth color transitions. Photos are almost always posted on the Web as JPEGs.
JPEGs can’t have transparent areas, although there’s a workaround for that: Fill the background around the image with the same color as the web page you want to post it on. That way, the background blends into the web page, giving the impression that the object is surrounded by transparency. See Figure 17-4 (Save For Web file format options) for details on this trick.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) files are great for images with limited numbers of colors, like corporate logos and headlines. Text looks much sharper in GIF format than it does as a JPEG. GIFs also let you keep transparency as part of the image.
PNG (Portable Network Graphic) is a web graphics format that was created to overcome some of the disadvantages of JPEGs and GIFs. There’s a lot to like about PNG files: They can include transparent areas, and the format reduces the file size of photographs without losing data, as happens with JPEG files (see About JPEGs for more about that). PNG files’ big drawback is that only newer web browsers handle them well. Old versions of Internet Explorer are notorious for not supporting the PNG format, so if you’ve potentially got viewers with ancient computers, then you probably don’t want to use PNGs.
Elements makes it a breeze to save images in any of these formats using the Save For Web dialog box, explained next.