Sorry!! I left out an important fact: BMPs are HUGE!!
So you really HAVE to use "something else" if you are making a document that
is going to contain more than one or two pictures
A full-page BMP at 600 dpi is about 807,840,000 bytes: it will wipe out your
whole hard disk
TIFFs are the graphics industry's "preferred" format, because they lose
neither resolution nor colour. But they're big: even compressed they're
only about a tenth the size of a BMP, depending on what's in them.
PNG is a good choice in Word because it supports the maximum number of
colours Word can handle, and also does not remove any resolution. It's
about a 20th the size of a BMP.
A GIF sacrifices colours to preserve sharpness (good for line drawings and
screen shops). It's half the size of a PNG but supports only 256 colours.
Few screen-shots or line drawings contain more colours than that.
JPEG is the format of choice for photos. It sacrifices detail (sharpness)
to preserve colour. If you drag the JPEG "quality" slider down to about
half-way, that's about as small as you can get it without producing
noticeable artefacts (fringes...) and at that stage, a JPEG will be about
100th the size of the BMP.
However: Really large savings are possible if you warm up the trusty
graphics editor and start doing some cropping and down-sampling.
First, make a copy of the picture and remove from the image the parts you do
not need. Most sensible photographers shoot a picture a bit larger than
they think they will need: it's much easier to get the framing perfect in
the graphics editor later, than it is in the middle of a football crowd
going ballistic while the home team scores!
Now: re-size the picture to the size you actually want it to appear. Yeah,
I know, this requires thought and planning. Sorry... But it's really worth
it -- you end up with a small, fast, reliable document you can email
anywhere
Until you get the hang of it, drop the image into the document where it
belongs and drag a corner until it looks right. Print it, and measure the
photo with a ruler. Now delete the picture from the document, open the
original in the graphics editor, and use its "Resize" command to set the
cropped picture to exactly the size you are going to use.
Always re-size before you re-sample: the resizing algorithm works better if
it has the maximum number of pixels to choose from.
Now: Do you REALLY need all those 600 dots per inch? Normally, "No". If
you are going out to a commercial colour printing press, "yes", which is why
they prefer TIFF. For ANYTHING else, 600 dpi is way over-kill.
For an office laser printer or a domestic inkjet, 300 is heaps if you are in
black and white. In colour, 150 dpi is fine. Going out to the web or other
on-screen display, there is no point in sending more than 96 dpi -- the
display device will simply throw them away when it gets them. And I defy
anyone to notice the difference (in colour!!) if you drop it down to 72 dpi.
OK, for the truly adventurous (and anyone else who can't get the damn thing
to email to your recipient because it's still too big...) you can reduce the
colour depth. Don't try this on a photo: the result is usually so
"artistic" most of us would call it disgusting. But for a line-drawing, you
can cut the colours way back from the standard "millions".
A good graphics editor will tell you how many colours are actually "in use"
in a graphic. If you set the colour depth to exactly that, and set the
palette to "adaptive" your pic is now as small as it can be. Chances are
that 800 megabyte monster is down to around 20 or 30 kb
"Most people" don't know all this stuff. Many people think the software
should take care of all of this without them having to think. Some people
believe they "don't have time" to learn to do all this. Those of us who
have been in the industry 20 or 30 years sometimes wonder when they will
find the time to enjoy their lives...
"No", the software CAN'T do it for you, unless you are prepared to tell it
what you can afford to "lose" -- there are no free lunches, and no free
pixels. And if "nobody" does this stuff, your documents, the lateness of
the hour, and the elevation of your blood-pressure, will all grow
geometrically as you struggle with cranky, unreliable documents and frequent
crashes.
Ever wondered how it is that Word always seems to crash and lose your work
the day before your deadline? That's because that's when the document
finally has all the pictures in it, and you haven't down-sized them
Hope this helps
Hello John,
Wow, that was highly useful information. Thank you for the thorough
assistance. Perhaps I wouldn't want to insert Photoshop TIFFs into Word 2008
tables (.doc files), if it can be avoided. I'll stick to BMP and PNG (as a
secondary choice).
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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:
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