Optimising Images is really important in an industry like the Games Industry where images need to be optimised for different purposes 4 examples of this are:
Having your image professionally printed by a printing firm, quality is important so you need to maintain the maximum image quality. The file size isn't important in this instance so you can have huge file sizes (Photo shop), PSD files are too big to upload or send in e-mails so you may have to either burn file to a DVD or put the file on a 8GB memory stick and post it to your manager or you could deliver the file to the printers yourself. For best print quality set the image to 300dpi and send send PSD file so all the information such as layers are kept.
If your company asks for a version that can be uploaded onto the company's intranet for managers in different continent to see, the quality of the image is important however, file size is also important. The image cannot be a PSD file as it can't be viewed online and also managers may not have Photo Shop installed on their machine. It is recommended that you should save the file in a lossless file like PNG. It has to be set at 72dpi to reduce file size so that it would load onto the web quicker. PNG files are smaller than PSD, but it loses features on PSD like layers. This doesn't matter as managers don't need to see this information.
If the company requires an image that can be uploaded on their main website you may need to save this in a lossy format like JPG so the file size is reduced and therefore the quality drops a little, but not too much. Reducing the size of the image means it will be quicker to download on the website and also alter the resolution to approximately 72dpi.
If the company requires a version which can be downloaded on a smart phone, file sizes are most important as the download capability is limited therefore small file sizes are crucial. Reducing the size of the image even further by saving it in a lossy JPG format and reduce the quality a bit more by reducing the colours to 256. Also you could change the dpi to approximately 60.
The things to change/optimise are:
- Size of image
- Quality of image
- DPI of image
- File type of image
- Number of colours in the image
Make sure that you save an original copy of your image and never overwrite a file, just save a copy in another format.
Storage of Image Assets
Organisation of files is important when you are working with over 50 different files so creating folder is efficient and essential. For example if you are working on an Autumn Advertising Campaign for a project create a folder and label it "Autumn Advertising Campaign" and you were doing bird images, to organise your work you need sub folders, label them "FINAL version" and "MOCKUPS" and the files you want to deliver for your manager to see go in the "FINAL version", also the file name varies according to file type. So for example if you want the original copy to be distinctive, name it "bird_ORIGINAL_300.psd", this is clearly high quality because it is the original version and it has 300 DPI. Make sure you name your files sensibly as it can be difficult if you have 50 images to organise. For example "bird_copy_72" is a PNG file and "bird_copy_web_72" is a JPG file and the difference is noticable as a JPG is a lossy format and the quality will suffer, but a PNG file can be uploaded and keep it's quality.
