Background

[Marty]

I invite everyone to view the following page.
http://www.adventurebound.co.uk/africa/

It will take some time to load as I have used a jpg image as the background.
When loaded you will see an amazing front page but the download time is too long.

How can I use this image as a background on my page but cutting down the loading time? I have visited pages where they use beautifl images in their backgrounds, however the image does not take an age to download.

Any ideas at all would be appreciated.

MARTY

[Jeff]

Compression is the name of the game.[nbsp][nbsp]Your image is quite intricate without huge areas of solid color.[nbsp][nbsp]This is good.[nbsp][nbsp]It means you can heavily compress it without losing too much perceived quality, or in other words, without the jpeg compression grid becoming aparent.[nbsp][nbsp]

I took your original image with Corel PhotoPaint and resaved it with a jpeg setting of 80 (in corel 0 is no compression and 100 is maximum compression.[nbsp][nbsp]Typically on a 200-400 pixel standard image, a setting of 20-40 is used in Corel, but as I said, your particular image is very compressible)[nbsp][nbsp]This brought the file size from 172kb to 47kb without any visible loss in quality.[nbsp][nbsp]Products such as Macromedia Fireworks, Adobe Imageready or even Photoshop 6 (but not before) may have even better jpeg compression schemes.[nbsp][nbsp]If you don't already have it though, you need software which shows you before and after side by side so you can choose the exact right level of maximum compression.
[This message has been edited by Jeff (edited 01-22-01@05:50 am)]

[Shalazar]

Using Adobe ImageReady I could also get it down to approximately 47kb with some heavy JPEG compression.[nbsp][nbsp]I was surprised at how well it turned out.[nbsp][nbsp]You're lucky the background of the photo has been shot out of focus, it really cuts down on the artifacts that would normally be glaringly obvious.[nbsp][nbsp]

You end up losing some of the crispness the image originally had, but the leopard retains the majority of its quality from the original, and it would still make a fine background image -- at a nearly 4-fold reduction in file weight.