Optimizing Images for Email and the Web

Including images to your emails and website is a great way to add pizzazz to your online efforts. But getting high quality images that download fast can be a challenge. Here are some tips on making your images look great online.

There are three main sources for images:

1. Images you take with your digital camera - Digital imagery is the easiest to implement. More on that in a minute.

2. Images you take with your conventional camera - With conventional photos or images, you must scan images using a scanner before optimizing them for online. Here are some tips in getting the best scanned images:

	Always scan your image at a high resolution so that you art starting with the best quality image.
	Make sure your scanner is set according to the type of photo you are scanning, color or grayscale
	Line up your artwork on the scanner bed before you scan...setting things straight in the scanner saves headaches later.
	Add it to other marketing efforts like advertisements.
	Ask on customer service, sales, and technical support calls.

3. Stock photography – These are general photos kept in online repositories. Try the following resources:

	Getty Images
	Stock Exchange
	Comstock

Once you have images, the goal is to make them as nice looking at as small file size as possible so they download quickly. There are various programs you can use to make your images ready for the web; Adobe Photoshop is the most common but also costly. There are freeware programs like PaintShop Pro that will also work.

We've given you instructions for Photoshop, but the end result no matter which program you use is the same – you crop the image if needed, change the resolution to 72 dpi (dots per inch), resize it if needed, and reduce its file size. In PhotoShop, the steps are:

	Open your image. If you want to crop it, select the part of the image to keep with your rectangle tool and then choosing Image/Crop.
	From the Image menu, select Image Size. Set the resolution to 72 dpi (the maximum allowed online) and the image width and height you like. (You can “View actual pixels” to make sure you're seeing what your audience will see.)
	PhotoShop has an option called “Save for Web” on the file window that will help you “optimize,” or reduce file size, of your image. Make sure to select JPEG in the Settings area, and choose the quality level as you like. You might want to start with 50% quality level and work up or down from there.

Once your image is saved, adding it to your email is easy with a tool like MailMentum (www.mailmentum.com) or to your website with a tool like DreamWeaver ( www.dreamweaver.com ) or FrontPage (www.microsoft.com/frontpage). Good luck!

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