FOCUS

Picture Editing

What are pictures (or images as we like to call it)?

A picture is any graphic work carried out on a website, it could simply be a bar or line. For example: The line shown below is a picture because it is not typed (i.e. its not a text) rather it is designed as an image or picture.

Pictures form integral parts of any page you need to design. Your pages must be colourful and there is no better to make pages come alive than by adding pictures to them. Yet pictures need to be worked upon before they fit into your webpages it is a rare occurence whereby a picture fits in without a bit of processing is done on them.

There some programs you can use to do the editing. Examples are Coreldraw, Abode Photoshop, Abode Illustrator, etc. These allow you to introduce stuff like background, shading and other nice things into the picture you want to use on your site. Editing your pictures can be frustrating if you don't plan your pages ahead. so before anything make sure you plan how your pages will look like before your start work on the pictures. After making your plans and you are about to start working on your pictures take note of the following:

Tips on editing you pictures (images)

1. JPEG or GIF: JPEG and GIF are the most popular formats for saving edited pictures. Designers are yet to agree on a better format of the two but there seems to be a general convention about which format to use which is when editing photographs or images with more than 256 colours use JPEG but when editing small icons or text with a few colours use GIF.

2. Animated graphics: Try to lower the number of animated graphics to the barest minimum. Reason ? (i) They take too long to load. (ii) They distract the visitor from the content of the page (and that is not good) this is why big sites use animated graphics mostly for advertisement, check out YAHOO!, Hotmail.com etc. (iii) They make the computer run slower bcause the computer system has to process the animation frame-by-frame. Therefore before you start adding animation take a few minutes to think about how the overal effect of the animation if it doesn't add anything special to your page, forget!

3. Use of pictured backgrounds: Using pictures as a background can be very nice BUT never use a background that overshadows your text. For example, i created a background for the text on this site otherwise you would have problems reading the text, also the background kind of 'drives' your attention to the content of each page. There is no point having a fantastic site with a wonderful background but on which no one can decipher the text you put on it. So as much as possible use a plain black or white background. Most especially for corporate sites.