In the USA and any other country where the Berne Convention applies copyright is automatic – you don’t need to apply for it. However if you find someone using your work without permission your copyright may need to be proved. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to simply add a digital stamp to your images when you create them, including the © symbol, your name and the date the work was created. Any image editing app can be used to do this – just make sure you “flatten” the image before distributing it, as if you leave the copyright stamp in a separate layer it may be possible for others to edit it without leaving evidence. An even more effective method is to incorporate a watermark into free versions of the image, ideally including the same copyright information. This way, if people like the image and want to obtain a non-watermarked version they can buy one from you. At the same time if anyone uses a free version it will be obvious from the watermark that they haven’t paid for it. Most watermarks are clearly visible, but others are not obvious to the naked eye; someone using the image without permission might not even know it’s there, but the creator will and can prove it.

Digital images allow meta information to be embedded in various ways. This can also be valuable in proving ownership or in complying with license conditions. For example popular web content systems like WordPress allow users to add various comments to images, including attribution of the work to the original creator.

A recent innovation is the use of Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons is a nonprofit which has developed a series of licenses based on US copyright law. The benefit of these is they are recognized by many image sites, such as Flickr, and give the creator a lot of control over how their work is used. For example a license can be created that allows others to use the work on condition they attribute it properly to the creator, or authorizes use only for noncommercial purposes.

At first glance copyright law can seem complex, but if you’ve put time and effort into creating images you have a right to control how they’re used and to decide who profits from them. The basic steps above will let you set the conditions for use of your work, prove your copyright over it and demonstrate whether use is authorized or not. For the sake of a few minutes at the end of the creation process it makes no sense not to add all the protection you can.

Image editing has become a necessary skill to all types of businesses.  Here we have an example of a pixelated arborvitae tree courtesy of www.thetreecenter.com.  Even a plant business such as this needs editing software if they intend on having an online presence in the tree industry.

Before you decide on any software you need to take your time and asses the suitability of the software. The software should also be easy for you to use so that you will avoid errors when making use of it. The software can be hard for you to understand on how to make use of it, but after you take an initiative and carry out your research online you will easily access necessary information which will enable you handle different software easily. The following are the best image editing software that you can try:

1. Adobe Photoshop

This is the most advanced software that you can use to edit images. The software has a lot of features which you can use to achieve complex features on your images. The software has a complex user interface which requires someone with enough knowledge on how to make use of it so that the person will achieve in making use of it. With the software in case you know how to make use of it, you can achieve to come up with different designs no matter how complicated they are. In case you will like to make use of the software you need to make a habit of practicing it where you will gain experience with time for you to start enjoying it.

2. Adobe light room

The software is a bit different from other photo editing tools where it works by employing an integrated workflow which allows the users to manage, import, edit and share photos. The software enables users to edit images while it maintains the original image properties. This makes it possible for the users to go back after they have edited the image. For example you may do some editing on an image but later you discover that the editing features that you have employed are not the best. With adobe light room you can just go back by undoing the editing options that you may have carried out on the image. This has made many people prefer making use of the software.

3. Gimp

GNU image Manipulation Program was developed in 1996. Since its development it has been improved over the years hence making it very helpful to the users. The software is free which make it readily available for photographers to make use of it. With GIMP you can easily edit the color of the image, enhance brightness and contrast of the image. In case you will like to make the image blurred or sharp, you can also enjoy making use of the software for you to achieve such effects. Other features that the software support include making the image into an animation, removing red eye, turning the photo to different lighting effects, oil painting of a photo among other features.

4. Paint.NET

With this software you can achieve great adjustments of your image such as rotating the image, resizing and other paint tools that are available on the software. In case you will like to introduce special effects on your image, the software can also serve you well. Even if you are a complete graphics noive, the software is very easy for you to use. This has made the software very popular in the photography field.

5. PhoXo

This is a software that has been in use for more than 10 years now. It is very easy to sue where children can easily play around with its clipart. It also allows customizing images with cartoons. With the software you will also achieve in adding watermarks to your images. The image transformation tools available on the software can easily make you enjoy turning folders of your images into beautiful looking photos which your clients will really appreciate.

6. Funny Photo Maker

This is a software that does not have features such as smart selection, layer support, drawing options or paint. The software has other amazing effects which you can easily apply to your image within a matter of seconds. Some of the features that the software support include adding someone’s face to a movie poster, transforming an image into an animation, adding rain or snow to an image ,turning a photo into a collage, applying frames to a photo and other amazing features.

7. Photo Pos Pro

The software has a lot of paint tools color correction features, support layers among other features. The software is very popular in photography where it allows the users to easily automate editing features hence making the work of photographers in trying to edit photos very easy. Some fun touches available on the software will allow you as a user enjoy adding effects such as bubbles, fireworks, stardust and many other interesting features.

8. PhotoScape

In case you will like to have funs and quick editing to your photo, then this is a software for you to go for. The options available on the software are very configurable which make the software really enjoyable for may users who will like to add editing to a photo within the shortest time possible. With the software it will take a matter of seconds to turn a photo into an oil painting. It supports several artistic styles such as pencil, paste, cartoon among other features that you will really enjoy.

9. IrfanView

Although the software mostly involve viewing images, it is also very helpful in editing images. With the software you can easily achieve features such as resizing an image, tweaking the colors of a given image, changing brightness of the photo as well as changing the contrast of the images. With the software you will also enjoy adding captions to an image, remove red eye, sharpen your photo and be able to add a wide range of editing features.

Why image optimization is so important?

Most customers wait about 2-3 seconds for a site to load on their desktop or laptop.

…and about 5 seconds on their mobile device.

Amazon and Walmart found that if their pages slow down by even 2 second, they lose $1.7-2.6 billion a year!

Google now uses page load time as an important factor in their ranking algorithm.

If you have images that slowly “drool” down the screen and take over 20 seconds to load – well, you can be sure that most of your prospective customer will move on to the next website for business!

Photographs constitute an important part of most websites and on average take about half or one-third of its “weight”. Aside from their quality, it’s also important that they are properly optimized. Image optimization can be viewed from two aspects; the first aspect is the file size and loading speed of each image, while the second aspect includes proper naming and optimization of image files for search engines.

If it take too long for a site to load, it’s likely that photos used on the site are not properly optimized. This may result in a slow website that may rank low on search engines. These days, millions also access Internet on their mobile devices which means slower downloading speeds and limitations on data, which is another valid reason for proper image optimization if you want greater online visibility and more customers.

Photos clicked by a camera are of high resolution (i.e 3456 x 2304 px). They are large files that might be suitable for printing but would take minutes to load. Therefore, first step in image optimization is to resize the image to a smaller resolution. It’s not necessary to be an expert programmer to do that as there are many programmers such as Gimp and Photoshop that can do this for you. You need to buy few of them while others are free.

So what are your options?

If you have more images on your website, you can consider reducing the size of your image files. This will immediately increase pageload speed leading to more visitors and more business. Less visitors who visit your site will click away.

You can reduce your image file size in Photoshop by using the “Save for Web” command. When you’re using this command, you can adjust the image to its lowest acceptable file size while keeping any eye on its quality.

What if you don’t have Photoshop?

If you don’t have access to Photoshop, there are many online tools that you can use for image editing. Even Adobe offers an online image editing software at photoshop.com. Although this tool doesn’t have all the capabilities of Adobe software but it’s free and still covers basics of image editing.

Other impressive image editing tools available online are PicMonkey, Pixlr, FotoFlexer, and FastStone. FastStone looks promising as it can resize multiple images in one go, and they can also be edited, i.e. you can add contrast, saturation and sharpness. There are few predefined resolutions and recommended resolution for photo galleries is 1024×768 px or 800×600 px.

Even after resizing, some images may still stay too large. Yahoo offers an excellent tool Smushit that uses optimization techniques specific to your image format for removing unnecessary bytes without affecting its quality. After optimization, Smushit will report bytes that would be saved and also provides you an downloadable zip file with redcued image files.

Another useful tool for image optimization is Tiny PNG. This tool uses a smart lossy compression technique for reducing file size while preserving complete transparency. If you use PNG images on your website, you can use this tool. Using this tool, you can be sure that images on your site are in optimal size and will also download fast.

Finally, there is GIMP. it is an open-source, free image editing tool that can be run on Windows, Linux or Mac. It can do everything that Photoshop can do, but its bit clunkier. But if you’re looking for a free image editing application – you can’t beat it!

Using the right image files

The three common image file formats are GIF, JPG, and PNG. JPG images have become a de factor image standard online. These files can be compressed considerably and retain quality with small file sizes. GIF images have lower quality than JPEG and are mostly used for simple images such as decorative images or icons. Regarding optimization, GIF can be used for simple images (with few colors) on your webpage. GIF is not best for complex and large images. PNG images support more colors than GIF images and they also don’t degrade with re-saves like GIF or JPEG.

For ecommerce sites, JPEG images are best. Avoid using GIF images for large product images. They are best for decorative or thumbnail images. PNG is the best alternative to both JPEG and GIF’s. If you’re using PNG for product images, then use PNG-8 over PNG-24.

How large your image files should be?

If you have an ecommerce website, you should keep your image size below 75 KB. This can be difficult at times, but your website will load faster.

Proper file naming and optimization for search engines

Once you’ve reduced the size of images, they’re ready to be published online on your blog or website. As search engines cannot “see” what’s there in a image, so further optimization is also necessary to make sure images will also display in the search results. Two important things in optimization for search engines are “Alt” text and file naming. Good way to go is to use descriptive image titles. If you’re displaying a car in a image, then this image should be named car.jpg. If you name your image as IMG-46577.jpg, search engines won’t understand what this image is all about and the won’t be able to index it properly.

Suppose that you are trying to sell an apartment in the center of Texas and you name your image photo5.jpg, and fail to use “Alt” text it is very likely that your ad will not reach target customers who might be interested in renting the apartment. On the other hand if you name your image four-bedroom-apartment-in-Texas-center.jpg and write “One bedroom apartment in the center of Texas” for the “Alt” text, your image will be indexed within a certain period of time for those keywords and will be shown in search results for those keywords.

Sources

https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-images

http://zemalf.com/1366/how-to-optimize-images-for-web/

http://webmarketingtoday.com/articles/4-Image-Optimization-Tips/

http://www.razorsocial.com/optimize-images-for-web/

Conclusion

All in all, It’s easy to optimize images without losing their quality. It definitely takes a bit of extra time but results can be surprising!

The compressing of your image can be done in two different ways. The first one is Lossy compression and second one is Lossless compression. In Lossy compress method, the original image will get compressed but some information like fine details and minute color degradation will be lost in this approach but they are almost non identical. On the contrary, in Lossless compression method your image file size will get reduced without compromising with any details of the image. You can go for any one these methods to compress your image file size based on your requirements. Normally, most of the browsers support JIF,JPEG, PNG image file formats and each of these formats supports either Lossy or Lossless compression method.

The details about the different image file format and different approach to compress these image file are mentioned below. Go through them and you will get a clear idea about compressing images to save file size.

GIF

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format and it is the oldest type of file format and is accepted by almost all browsers. It supports 8 bit images and allows maximum of 256 colors. If you don’t want to compromise with the quality of your image and want to get the original image even after compressing it then you need to save your file with extension Gif. This is because Gif supports Lossless method of compression which keeps the original image even after compressing the image file size. But when you save your image in Photoshop using interlaced option then after uploading it in the websites, at first it will show a bit faded image but slowly the original image will get displayed. The other option that you can go for is non-interlaced in Photoshop. Here you will only see a red X initially after uploading the image and you can see the full image only after the entire image gets downloaded. The only problem with interlaced is that it slightly raises the image file size. GIF is highly advisable for images like flat-color, text or sharp edged images. Most of the people are very particular about sharpness of the image. So for them GIF is the ideal choice.

Golden Eagle is an online retailer of precious metals.  This is a great place to buy silver coins & bars.  We worked with them recently to optimize some of their images.  Since silver is largely black and whites & greys, there is a lot you can do as far as optimizing the file sizes to save bandwidth.  Here is an example of one of their silver bars in which we optimized the image to save file size.

PNG

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphic and it follows Lossless algorithm. This means no compromise with the quality of the image. You can be sure to get the original image even after compression. PNG is technically a replacement for GIF and it has all the characteristics just like GIF except animation. PNG has addition features which are not seen in GIF. For instance, it has error detection facility and it also supports true color along with alpha channel. PNG comes with two facilities. One is color masking and the other is alpha channel. PNG alpha channel helps to increase the glow of the image by hiding the unnecessary shadows created by the back ground. Well, all browsers do not support PNG but you can use PNG in your older version of browser with the help of plug-in. At last, keep in mind that PNG file are not zip able because they are already compressed.

JPEG

JPEG is not another image file format but it is a compression algorithm and it supports Lossy algorithm. This means minute details about the image will be missing in the compressed image file. JPEG is specially designed to satisfy the needs of different types of users according to their need. You will not be asked to compress your image under fixed size whereas you will be given flexibility to choose your desired compressed image file size. This method lowers the size of the image you want. But after compression the result will be degradation of quality, which means you can choose either quality or quantity. JPEG supports 24-bit color. JPEG can reduce the file size drastically. For example, if the file size is 900k, it can be reduced to 24 k. JPEG is not suitable for compressing flat colored or sharp images. In JPEG compression technique, the more you reduce the original size of the image there will be more degradation in quality in terms of color and sharpness of the image.

Article Resources 

The resources for the article are obtained from the following links given below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_compression
http://www.wikihow.com/Compress-Photo-Files-With-Microsoft-Office-Picture-Manager
http://onlinesupport.conted.ox.ac.uk/TechnicalSupport/CompressingImagesToReduceFileSize.php

Summary

Well, you can go for any of the above mentioned approaches for compressing images to save file size. But, it is very important for you to keep in mind that each file format has their own limitations regarding image file compression. Hence, based on your requirements you can adopt any one of the approaches and can reduce your image file size according to your criteria.

With the given techniques of compressing images to save file size, you will no more face any problem to upload your desired image to your favorite web sites or blog or for sending images. The above file formats are supportive in all web browsers and you can see the images in the same form in lossless compression technique and with minor compromises in Lossy algorithm technique. So, before you go for compressing you image, be very clear about your requirement and purpose for compressing image and then accordingly take up any image file format. Hopefully, the given information has surely educated you in detail about the different image file formats and their specific characteristics.

Being indexed color images, GIF file contains a limited palette that is saved simultaneously with the image. The less color you use in your image, the smaller the size of the file will be. For that to happen with animated GIF’s, each frame in the file should use the same color pallete….so, if you’re varying the colors significantly from frame to frame, you’ll get a much larger file. Therefore, to limit the file size, you should try to limit colors as much as possible, and use same colors from frame to frame.

More information available here on creating an animated GIF in adobe photoshop

You can reduce the file size of GIF images by cutting down on the pixel dimensions. Cutting the number of frames in your animated GIF file will also reduce its size. GIG animations won’t work for large dimensions. Therefore, to keep the reasonable size for use on the Internet, you should limit the size of GIF animations to couple of hundred pixels.

Let’s have a close look at all available options for converting a video to GIF animation, and ways to optimize its file size. Let’s get started!

• Trimming animation-You will need to open your video file with Photoshop. For GIF animation, you won’t need the whole sequence, so you can trim the video in the Timeline Panel. At this point turn on the loop option and find a good place to trim the video.
• Reducing image size-Image size can be reduced from the Image menu. You can also do that later in “Save for Web” dialog box. It’s best if you do it in the beginning with Image Size Dialog Box as it will save considerable loading time when you open the Save for Web dialog box. You need to turn your video layer to a Smart Object if you want to resize your image, but don’t worry, this won’t affect your workflow at all.
• Save for web-The best thing about this workflow is that you don’t have to do any conversion on the Timeline panel so as to save a frame animation, because Save for Web dialog box will do this work for you once you choose the GIF file format as your output. Keep in mind that animation options will appear on the bottom right corner of the dialog box. If you want to further reduce the size of your GIF image, you can still do that here.
• Reducing the amount of frames-You can also further reduce the size of your GIF animation if reopen the exported file back into the Photoshop and delete each of its second or third frame from the Timeline Panel. Then select all the remaining frames and slightly increase their duration to compensate for any loss of frames. If this compensation is not done, then your animation will play faster than original. Once you’re ready, you can save this new version, which will be much smaller than the original one.
• Number of colors-The best option here is to optimize the size of GIF file is the number of colors used in the Color Table. The maximum number is 256, which comes with the 8-bot depth limitation. Usually, it’s best to stick with 64 colors or less, but depending on your original video you might have to increase the number of colors to get much better results.
• Choosing the best color reduction algorithm-Perceptual is best to create a custom color table by using colors for which human eye has greater sensitivity.

Adaptive is best to create a custom color table by sampling various colors from the spectrum that appear most commonly in the image. For instance, an image with the shades of blue or green produces color table made primarily of blues and greens. Most of the images concentrate colors in a specific area of the spectrum.

Selective would work best if you want to create a color table similar to Perceptual color table, but for preserving Web colors and for favoring broad areas of colors. Usually this color table produces images with the greatest color integrity.

Restrictive uses the standard 216 color with web safe color table common to the 8 bit panels of Mac OS and Windows. This option will ensure no browser dither is applied to colors when images are displayed using 8 bit color. If your image has fewer than 216 colors then all unused colors will be automatically removed from the table.

• Dithering-Since most GIF files have limited number of colors, you may want to imitate all missing colors with available ones using the dithering. You can choose one of the algorithms from the “Dither” menu for such imitation. With “Noise” and “Pattern” algorithms there’s nothing to adjust. The “Diffusion” method will let you adjust the amount of dither. The more the dithering of GIF image, the larger the file size. Dithering will add multi-colored pixels that will be in close proximity to each other and will simulate smooth gradations of colors or secondary colors. Some images must have dithering in order to look impressive, but you should try to limit it in an image to reduce file size.
• Web Snap, Transparency, Lossy, and Interlaced-Web Snap helps in preventing dithering in a browser. It can be done by snapping few colors to Web-safe colors. The more the Web-safe colors in your GIF, the less dithering will result. A value of 0 percent won’t change any colors while a value of 100 will change all the colors in the GIF image to Web-safe. Web Snap is mostly used to help prevent dithering in browsers.

If you image contains Transparency, choose Transparency for preventing transparent pixels. Deselect it to fill partially or fully transparent pixels with matter color.

Lossy compression will discard visual information that can reduce the file size.

Interlaced GIF animation files are loaded on a browser in a few passes

• Compare the original and optimized versions-Once you’ve added custom changes, you should check the difference in quality and file size by using the 2-Up view.
• Preview, save preset and optimize to file size-If you’re satisfied with the settings take a look at your final GIF using the Preview option in browser, and save your settings as preset. With this additional option in Optimize Menu you can specify file size and once this is applied, the Photoshop will fit the file size with the best possible image quality.

Resources:

http://www.webreference.com/dev/gifanim/index.html

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/aboutgraphics/l/aaoptimizegifs.htm

http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/general/ht/smallergifs.htm

http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/5171/optimizing-gif-image-sizes

Conclusion

All in all, optimization of animated GIF’s helps you get best results without compromising on quality. Most of the GIF compression software works in a similar way, so it’s not so much a matter of finding the “best” program. A better approach would be to learn about how GIF compression works and keep that in mind throughout the image creation process.

Common file types

TIFF – This is a very flexible format which can either be lossless or lossy. A lossless compression will discard not even single information regarding the image. It is the most efficient way of presenting an image without compromising accuracy. On the other hand, a lossy algorithm allows some loss of information on the image in order to achieve its smaller size. In most case, this file type is used a lossless image storage format which does not use compression completely. Almost all the graphics that use this file type do not compression and as a result, their images are quite large.

PNG – PNG is a lossless storage format but contrast with common TIFF usage. In simple terms, it looks for some specific patterns in the image which it uses to compress the size of the file. Most importantly, the whole process of compression is reversible; therefore, the image can be recovered exactly.

GIF – This type of file type creates a table of up to two hundred and fifty six colors from a pool of sixteen million. For those images with fewer colors than 256, their images are rendered exactly. In case the image happens to contain many colors, the software which creates the GIF will use one of the many algorithms to approximate the colors in the image with the limited palette of 256 colors available.
It is also very crucial to note that this file type achieves compression in two ways. One of the ways is to reduce the number of colors of those images with many of them, thereby reducing the total number of bits that are needed per pixel. The second way is by replacing commonly occurring patterns with shorter abbreviations. For instance, instead of storing “black, black, black, black, black,” it just stores “5 black.” This file type is for those images with 256 colors or less. Images that contain more 256 colors are likely to lose up to 99.99% of their colors if GIF format is used.

JPG -This format is mostly used for photographs and other images with many colors. This is one of the file types which can achieve an astounding compression ratio and maintain higher quality images. Other formats such as GIF become so unkind to such images. JPG analyses the image then discards any information which the eye can’t easily notice. Unlike other files, its compression is adjustable and stores information as 24 bit color. At moderate compression level, your eye can not discern from original even at extreme magnification.

Does not include some various adobe product formats such as PSD, PSB, AI etc.

RAW – This is an image output option that is found in many cameras. As much as it is lossless, it is a factor of four smaller than TIFF files of the same image. However, you may get this format so disadvantageous. This is because every manufacturer has own RAW format. Therefore, you may be required to have the manufacturer’s software to view the images. There are other graphics applications which can read other manufacturer’s formats though they are very few.

PSD, PSP, etc-These are proprietary formats which are used by graphic programs. Paint shop pro files uses PSP while Photoshop’s files have PSD extension. These are the formats preferred especially when you want to edit the image in the software because they retain all the editing power of all programs. These packages make use of layers, for instance, when building those complex images. If non-proprietary formats such as TIFF and JPG, then some information is likely to be lost. However, you must ensure that you save the end results as a standard JPG or TIFF. Failure to do this, you may be unable to view it once your software is changed.

BMP -This format commonly used for saving the image files. Initially it was used on windows but is currently recognized by many other programs such as PCs and Macs. The BMP format is known for storing the color data for every pixel in the image with no compression. For instance, a 10×10 pixel BMP image will contain color data for 100 pixels. This way of storing image information give quality graphics, crisp and larger file sizes compared to compressed file types. However, very large file sizes makes BMP files unsuitable for web pages but the images can be used for high quality images.

GIF and JPG formats have currently dominated almost all web images. PNG format has been taken up by most of latest generation browsers. TIFF format is not widely accepted by web browsers therefore should be avoided for web use. PNG does work better as compared to GIF and it is even likely to replace it in future. This is because it produces smaller files and allows many colors. Unlike GIF, PNG supports partial transparency which can have many purposes such as fades and antialiasing of text. Unfortunately, the PNG format is not supported by the Microsoft’s internet explorer hence should be avoided by new web authors.

These are among the most common file types that are being used on webs. I have used a number of sites as my sources. You can get more information by following the link users.wfu.edu/matthews/music/graphics/formats.html. It has detailed information on the types of digital image files as well which can be of great importance to you if you need more facts.