Absolute Beginner's Guide to Digital Photography

way other people’s monitors display color, but you can reduce the problem.

Make sure the monitor on which you develop your Web images is calibrated

with Adobe Gamma or equivalent software.

■ Most computers receive information sent over the Internet at a very low

speed. Under typical conditions, it takes a fast modem more than four min-

utes to deliver a full-screen, 16 million-color image. Very few Web site visitors

will tolerate that sort of wait. File compression formats have been developed

to speed up the transmission of images, and new formats are being devel-

oped.

■ JPEG is the only universally accepted 24-bit photographic compression format

(see Chapter 7, “Files and File Formats”) for the Web. JPEG is designed to min-

imize the visible irregularities of brightness while allowing large color errors.

The success of the design is impressive; JPEG images compressed to 25 percent

of their original size rarely show signs of compression.

You should plan for compression. It’s a good idea to make sure your Web pages

(images plus text) are received by viewers in fewer than 30 seconds. You can esti-

mate this by adding together the sizes of all the files on the page and dividing the

total by the speed of your visitors’ modems. For example, if a page totals 75 kilo-

bytes and an average modem downloads data at 3 kilobytes per second, the down-

load time will be about 25 seconds. If your page takes too long to download, reduce

the file size of your photos by compressing them at a lower quality level or make

their pixel dimensions smaller.

Creating a Web Photo Gallery

Photoshop and Elements include the same powerful tool for building a Web site of

images, complete with navigation and separate pages. The Web Photo Gallery tool

creates a complete Web site of a directory of images. If

you have a number of images stored in a directory,

follow these steps to create a photo gallery:

1. In Photoshop Elements, choose File, Create
   Web Photo Gallery to display the Web Photo
   Gallery dialog box. In Photoshop, choose
   File, Automate, Web Photo Gallery. The
   Web Photo Gallery dialog box appears (see
   Figure 23.2).


2. Select a Web site style, such as Horizontal
   Dark or Simple. A thumbnail of the site will
   appear on the right side of the dialog box.

CHAPTER 23 DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE WEB 339

Be sure to uncheck

Include All Subfolders if

the images you’d like to use are

only in one directory.