When saving a GIF for a Web page, you should consider the size of the file. A bogged-down file will open slowly on a Web page. You can have the most spectacular image saved as a GIF and posted to your Web site, and yet, unless the visitor is your proud Uncle Charlie, your visitor will get tired of waiting for the image to load and will move on, leaving your masterpiece behind. Fortunately, Paint Shop Pro provides several ways to reduce the file size of a GIF.

One way to keep the audience captive is to first use a low SRC image and follow that with the higher quality, larger GIF. The idea is to make the original image and save it as a 256-color image, then make a copy that is greatly reduced in color. Color makes the file larger, because the computer has to reassemble all of the colors and compile them into a picture.

To reduce the colors in the copy, click on the Colors menu, choose Decrease Color Depth, and then select 16 Colors. The image may look choppy compared to the original, but it's a placeholder for the masterpiece to come. Save that image as a GIF also, but assign it a number. For example, if your original image is named MyCat.gif, name this one MyCat2.gif. Now use this code for the images on your Web page:

<img height="(your image height)" width="(your image width)" alt = "My Cat" SRC= "MyCat.gif" LOW SRC="MyCat2.gif">.

This HTML code will load the low SRC image first, then the higher quality GIF.


You can use the Export Transparent GIF function to reduce a file's size before posting the file to your Web page. Open an image in Paint Shop Pro. Now click on the File menu and choose Export, Transparent GIF. Choose None under the Transparency tab, then click over to the Colors tab. The first thing you see is the question, "How many colors do you want?" along with the numbers 16 to 256. The maximum for a GIF is 256 colors. To reduce the file's size, adjust the amount of colors in the image. You'll be surprised to learn that your image looks the same at 50 colors. Take a look at the comparison numbers for Uncompressed and Compressed. By trimming the colors to the bare minimum, you can achieve more than a 75 percent reduction in some cases.


In the previous part, we looked at how reducing the amount of colors can trim the file size of a GIF. Another method for reducing a file's size is dithering. Dithering is the computer's way of blending several pixels to make up the shades of one color. By default, the image would be 100 percent dithered (if you saved a file as a GIF without using a compression method). If the image is not a photograph, but rather a colorized clip art without a lot of three-dimensional highlights and shadows, you can dither the image down to zero percent with little effect on the image. Luckily, Paint Shop Pro offers a preview so you can make the adjustments and see how they change the image and the file size. In the next part, we'll look at the options you can use to reduce colors.


Paint Shop Pro gives you three options for reducing colors in a GIF image: Standard Web Safe, Optimized Median Cut, and Optimized Octree. The Standard Web Safe colors option (select File, Export, Transparent GIF, Colors) uses a set of generic colors that are universal to any color monitor. With this option, photographs look like well-drawn illustrations; for two-dimensional images with no highlights or shadows, this is the best way to go. Use the Export Transparent GIF option to get a good preview of how your image will look on the Web. In the next part, we'll look at Optimized Median Cut.