High Quality Images Options

[OhMyAnniee]

Whenever I save my images in Photoshop, they never seem to be high enough quality from my perspective. Even when I save it as a png, it still has rough edges/pixels. So I was wondering, what's the best way to save them?

[synapse]

I think photoshop optimizes images, anyway, if you want to have a gallery, or a subdomain for your images, but still keep it free and the quality high, there are lots of free hosts out there so you could always start your own website, or just join imageshack.us but then you still have a bandwidth.

I always get best quality from

jpeg>gif>png

[Gigi]

PNG's are lossless in that they retain quality, but also find certain "chunks" of an image to optimize (find patterns within an image to optimize). This is WAY, WAY better than saving in JPEG format if your sole purpose is to retain quality.

JPEG's are lossy, so they're better suited for compressing photographic images. If you save a JPEG of a graphic with both photographic images and text, you'll see those pixelly edges around the text. This can be alleviated (slightly) by saving at JPEG quality 12 on Photoshop, but you might as well save with .PNG.

Another good file to save as is a .TIFF (or .TIF). They are completely lossless, and you can choose whether or not to compress or not.

A quick comparison of different file types of a vector image (500x313) that I just whipped up:

TIFF (no LZW compression) 481KB
PNG 97.9KB
JPEG (Quality: 12) 124KB
GIF 37.7KB

As you can see, TIFF's have the biggest file size. Even the 12 quality JPEG is less than half its size. The PNG, while being lossless, compresses parts of the image...and since the picture I used was a vector (meaning, it had many similar colours that it could group together), it was able to compress the image to be even smaller than a 12 quality JPEG.

Bottom line:
TIFF: Completely lossless; may or may not be compressed - BEST QUALITY if you're looking for no loss of data.
PNG: Completely lossless; compresses patterns within an image
JPEG: Lossy, compresses; good for photographic images. Generally this, if saved at a high enough quality, will be sufficient for web use.
GIF: Now why the hell would you use a GIF, save for the possibility of a blinking avatar?