Our designer is a print designer and doesn't know a thing about the web so I hope someone here can help us out. The designer created a great logo, consisting of a line drawing and type, in Illustrator. She gave us a gif, which I believe she saved directly from the ai format. The gif looks crisp and perfect but when we reduce the size, using photoshop, the quality suffers. I thought that since gif is a lossless format, that wouldn't happen, especially since the original gif looks so good, but obviously I'm missing something. Since resizing gifs don't seem to work, is there another format she can give us that would allow us to reduce the size w/o quality degradation? Or would it be better for us to get gifs of various sizes? We'd prefer to be able to reduce it ourselves, but don't have illustrator. And we're working with photoshop 6, for now. Also, are gifs the right format for us to be using? Thanks very much for any help. Gunjan
Can you show us the image in question ? I can't imagine why it would lose quality in photoshop if you make it smaller, but I think that you can export a PSD from illustrator into photoshop, not sure whether that would help or not.
Gunjan You could try and use an image compression tool to shrink the file size, heres a good free one - search Google for (Riot image compression) Or when I'm using photoshop I use the (save for web) instead of (save as) - this brings up a split screen with your image in both allowing you to select different file formats (gif, png, jpg etc...) to see how the file size and picture quality changes. I normally bring the quality down just low enough to keep the quality good and find that jpg usually gives me a smaller file size and good quality for the web. Hope this helps Alex
You will always lose with a bitmap program, liek photoshop. All it is doing is reducing the size of the pixels. So you are normall OK goign smaller, but then if you need to increase that smaller image later you will lose big then. It will get pixelated as you make any bitmap image larger. If you are using vector, it handles the image with mathematics. That is why you can make them larger or smaller with no loss. So you may want to use illustrator or inskape to make different sizes of the image. Then export those to photoshop.
Well I guess you need another format of the picture, ehm you can do that with Corel Draw and .EPS files, they dont show pixels so the graphics should be fine, but i dont know if it supports sites...
Sorry, I didn't notice the .gif. If it is a gif file it is no longer a vector image, it is a bitmapp image. I would ask the designer for the ilustrator format. That way you can change with no issues and then once you resize(using which ever vector image program you want to) you will have zero loss. If you plan to put it in a flash animation the gif will be pretty big and flash works directly with vector images.