What you see is what you get! And that is also what sells. This is why web designers use images to fill up 50 percent or more on average website content with. Many mind-blowing effects and style polishing can be done with CSS itself but when it comes to real-life or HD visuals, pictures are the answer. Images have different formats and all of them need to be optimized to achieve the highest quality and lowest size for the Web. The three widespread image formats are .GIF, .JPG/JPEG and PNG. Each of them has its own usefulness but its drawback too as is listed below:
GIFs: (Graphic Interchange Format) has the lowest byte size and is tremendously used by programmers because of its internet browser support. Transparency and animation are two of its strong points so it is perfect for logo or button design. As well as this it’s highly used for graphic-text, backgrounds and box corners given its cartoon-like view. Sometimes scanned files are saved as GIFs because the low size permits easy and high-speed upload/download and FTP processes. Unfortunately GIF’s have only 256 color mode so pictures will look sharp but flat-colored mainly at the edges, and if it is used for bands, horizontally oriented bands of colors will compress better than vertically oriented bands.
JPGs: (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is the best format for presenting photographs, real life images and artwork. Documents will look smooth-toned, gives back all realistic true-color (has 16 million color mode support) and is extremely efficient in displaying visuals at high resolution. That is why HD pictures are in JPG format which offers high quality and contains even the smallest particles which are imperceptible for the human eye. Among its drawbacks it should be mentioned that JPGs get distorted at compression and become lossy, lower sizes usually meaning lack of details or simple colors.
PNGs: (Portable Network Graphics) is a lossless format, meaning that compression and resizing does not affect image quality being perfect for temporary design work or saving the stock photography. But quality comes with huge size which means slow loading time. It is used for professional logos or graphics which are crisp and clear and as well for thumbnails in case of picture galleries or product showcases. Usually there are two forms of each picture, a PNG-thumbnail version as preview and a JPG-original version for full view. Sadly it is not well supported by earlier versions of web browsers and its loading time causes issues for users with low-band connection.
Remember that there is no winner. All three formats should be used when it comes about the visual part of a website. With the perfect optimization everyone can get the perfect result for breath-taking and mind-blowing visuals.
