As you can see, my site has alot of images, some of which are over 450KB in size! I had great difficulty keeping image quality when changing them to anything other then PNG format...What can I do with the PNG images (such as the 1,000 flash website templates) to make them smaller, yet keep the same quality? thanks ahead!
smaller in filesize or smaller in dimensions? Try a program like PNGcrush or something to optimize your PNG's for the web - also, if you're saving them from Photoshop, use the export for web and not the 'save as' feature to get rid of half of the bloat.
In Photoshop you can reduce the dimensions and keep the quality. Then you can click save for web and save them as gifs or png's. That will greatly reduce the size.
only don't save them as GIF's, because they're not going to be full quality unless you only use a few colours, where PNG is lossless Oh, and it's an old format made by a long bankrupt company. Oh, and it doesn't support gamma correction or variable transparency.
i didnt know if you set the dimensions in html it would lower the quality, thanks for this bit of information
Try TimThumb. Its a really nifty script. I use it for my wordpress themes. What it does it echos an image which you set the height=h width=w zoom / crop which is 1 or 0 = zc quality =q also the image location
Install image resizer from microsoft power tools. Just right click the image, select resize from the pop up menu and select the image size you want. I take a lot of pictures in 5, 7 and 8 megapixel. Using this free tool from microsoft I can resize dozens even hundreds of images with just a couple of clicks. Its free and will save you a lot of time and effort. Follow this link - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx Scroll about 1/2 way down the page and look for Image Resizer.
Just use Photoshop's image adjustment options. Find the Image Size option, and you can adjust accordingly.
You talk about photoshop like its free. Either that, or a lot of the members here have a tree in their front yard that grows photoshop CDs.
Have you tried changing the format that there saved in? From .gif to .png and back and forth? You can also change the 'saved bit rate' although it may require a compressor.
An application I like to use just for resizing due to its simplicity is Paint Shop Pro. Also much easier on the pocketbook as some members have already pointed out.
As i can see, dimensions in html affect quality if you set an unproportional size or a size, your original that does not divide on evently. say, if you set an image which is 300x600 to 150x300, you'll not feel quality loss. As i think, the cause is the simplicity of browsers "on-the-run" resizing algorythms.
One way of preventing or limiting the image quality loss is to use the image size from the image tab or just press ALT+CTRL+I, then adjust the document size resolution higher ex. from 72->300 pixels/inch, after that adjust the pixel dimensions to your preffered width and height, then always use the save for web and devices feature for saving your images, make sure you adjust the quality settings when saving for different image formats.