What do you do to make an image web ready for your site? List at least 5 changes that need to be made. Fully explain the changes and why you need to make them.

To make my image from Niagara Falls web ready I need to:

·       Make a duplicate file of my original image.

After opening my image in Photoshop I would make a duplicate copy of my original image using a different file name (ex: original Niagara Falls Image) before I would start editing my image; just in case I would need to go back to the original image. 

·       Crop image.

This is the way to get the not so wanted tourists out of the image.  Click on the quick selection tool (forth one from the top on the left hand side of the tools bar) and click each part of the image, one click at a time.  That way you can be very specific as to what part of your image you should keep or crop it out.  Once you are happy with what you have, click edit and then copy.  Then click on file and click on new to copy the new edited image. Click on blank page and paste (click on edit then paste) the new image.  This is the part where you can make more changes to your image if you still need to crop some unwanted lines or more of the picture.  By clicking on the magnifying glass and then the image, you can make as big as you want then using the eraser tool you can make the changes more precise to achieve a better result.   

·       Save for the Web.

Click on file then click on file and save for the web and devices.  This part of getting the image ready is just as important as to cropping the image, because here is where you will pick the size and image resolution.  Choose what type of file you want to save your image in.  That will depend upon what type of work you need to accomplish and the look you want to achieve. 

Although JPEG is the most common file format to save web images, GIF is used to achieve the transparency on the web page.  For example, if I need the picture to be on my web page layout and it needs to be transparent, I would save it to be in the web page as GIF file.  Because it will allow me to have just the picture shown, letting the background color of the page show through part of the image, whereas the JPEG cannot have any transparent areas. You can preview the picture before saving it and then make the choice of, low, medium, high, and max which is referred to quality not the amount of compression. 

Then the size of the picture needs to be changed (to a thumbnail), this is also important because the larger the size of the image (file) the longer it will take to download (people will leave annoyed if it takes more than ten seconds).  If it is as a JPEG is ok, the quality (once the size is changed) should not change that much. 

Then choose a name to save as (I would do, web ready Niagara Falls) and save.

The image is web ready.