Hello - I am a total n00b when it comes to working with cropping photos and file size reduction. What I would like to know is how to reduce the size of an image so that it can increase page load time, but at the same time , keeping the quality of the picture at its best. Can someone tell me / teach me, how I can do the above with photoshop / fireworks / paint / etc. Any advice would be awesome! Thanks in advance!
photoshop - save for web - choose gif from he options or jpg and reduce the quality a bit to high or medium you can see if image the preview windows as you reduce quality also make sure the image size in pixels is reduced to whaever suits best
These two articles should explain the process and they have links to free software. article one Article two and this link will let you see the exact same photo at various levels of compression. Is is linked from article 1.