turning images into .gifs?

[Cheeseboy]

Hi, Im wondering what my images should be saved as that i can make .gifs out of? When i use jpegs and .bmp's they turn out blury.

Thanks:thumbsup:

[_Aerospace_Eng_]

Gifs should be fine. If they have a lot of bright colors and sharp edges gifs are fine, if they are like photos of your self then a high quality jpg would work. Don't use bmp as bmp isn't for the web and their file size is quite large.

[Cheeseboy]

High quality as in jpeg 2000?

[VIPStephan]

If you use the appropriate program (I use Macromedia Fireworks but there's also Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo Paint, and what not) it should be possible to make a gif out of (almost) everything. But it depends on how good you set the quality. Gifs are usually for graphics (gradients are gonna be hard to do as you save it having specific colors) and jpegs for photos and the like. But there's also the png (portable network graphic) format which is a good alternative to gifs and has some advantages.

If you are saving images for the web you should keep the file size below 50KB (if the quality won't be too bad) but it's always a choice between file size and quality.

[Cheeseboy]

heh, im using ms paint what format should i use inthere?

[_Aerospace_Eng_]

Hmm MS Paint is crap when saving an image. You may want to look into The GIMP (http://www.gimp.org). Its a free alternative to Photoshop.

[ttttt]

If you want it as a one off for a few images, then you could use a free trial of some software.

But a good point has been made. MS Paint is absolutely rubbish.

[felgall]

You need to keep your original images in a decent non-web format such as TIF if you are going to use JPG format on the web since any edits to a JPG seriouisly reduce image quality. Make all of your edits to the TIF version and convert to JPG as the final step.

GIF files don't have this problem so you can keep the GIF as the original for when you want to make subsequent edits.

Make sure to properly optimize images before loading them to the web. You want the lowest resolution that still allows the image to look reasonable on the web page.