|
What takes up space?
What is it about pictures that take up so much space on the computer?
size?
layers?
colour?
[ ]
Want to answer more questions in the Technology category?
Maybe give some free advice about: Computers?
It mostly has to do with the compression method. Physical size and complexity also play a part. A TIFF image, which is usually completely uncompressed, can take up 300MB for a single picture.
JPG is lossy, which means it takes out parts of the picture while compressing it. You'll get the smallest size with JPG, but the worst quality.
GIF is also lossy, but it's less noticeable.
PNG is the best overall format you can use, you never notice any loss from compression and it's very small
I've made some examples for you, this contains a TIFF file, and GIF, JPG, and PNG images converted from it with various levels of compression:
[Link](Mouse over link to see full location)
(the ads on that page might be a bit NSFW, sorry about that)
The best thing to do is use JPG with medium compression for all of your real-life pictures. Use PNG for everything else. You can convert images with irfanview:
[Link](Mouse over link to see full location)
Just for fun, here's an image converted to the data: URI scheme. It's something like how your computer sees an image:
[Link](Mouse over link to see full location)
If you use any browser other than IE, you can paste the text into your address bar and it'll show the picture.
]
All of the above have an impact on the file size.
It's usually the format that you save them in.
.bmp is big
.jpg is small
.gif is smaller
It's all to do with compression, and as a rule the less compressed they are, the poorer the quality.
Size of course also contributes, and the small the picture the smaller the filesize.
Also a 24bit colour picture will take up considerably more space than a 16 colour (not 16bit) one as well.
If you have any furtherquestions, feel free to ask me directly.
]
More Questions: |