Tom, 

1. Always ask yourself what the endresult must be: is it for the web or is it going to be printed? In your case I guess it is for the web
so why start at 300 DPI when you know the final result is going to be at 72 to 100DPI. For the web 300DPI is too much, for printing matters 
it is too little.  Choose a startresolution of 100DPI for webgraphics.

2. Why a TIFF file? There has always been problems with reading TIFF's as there are lots of different types of them and not every 
program can read all those variations well. If you want a 24bit colourdepth graphic, it is safer to keep them either as a Windows Bitmap 
(which can result in  huge file sizes though) or better, keep them in CorelDraw's or Photo-Paint's own format, converting them to JPEG 
before uploading. 
Remember, the more you compress the JPG the worse the result will be. I normally use a compression of 10%.
If it is a 8bit GIF file you want to reduce, think of choosing one of the colours to be transparant. (Photo-Paint has that feature)

3. Reducing 24bit to 8 bit paletted is always tricky. Also there: not every program can handle that well. Eventhough I also use CorelDraw
& Photopaint, it is Graphic Workshop Pro that does the converting for me. It counts the colours and makes a new colourpalet based on 
the colours in your graphic.  Keep in mind that these colours still might be outside the 256 Safe Colour Palet and that your visitors has to 
view your site in 24bit screencolourdepth. 

4. About resampling: If you have  made a vector graphic and you use anti-aliassing for smooth curving then keep in mind that smoothing
creates some lighter pixels along the curve. The graphic itself is not smoothed but the eye experiences it like that. Anti-aliassed graphics
can indeed look lousy  when you have resampled them down. I use myself a digital ruler (Reglo from Basta Computing) to indicate the 
final height and width of the graphics that I am going to make. That, and some flesh around it, is my working size. For detailed viewing and working 
you can blow up your screenview to X% -in Photo-Paint 1600% max. With this working method I hardly ever have to resample graphics
down. Resampling a rotated graphic can also give bad results unless the rotation is 90deg or 180deg.

5. Keep in mind that every reduction in princip is a decrease in quality whatever it is a reduction in size, colourdepth or filesize (like JPG-
compression)

I hope this might have helped you.
Greetings from Amsterdam
Pieter
						

On 12 Mar 2000, at 4:54, Tom Keatley wrote:

Hi all...

I have no doubt this has already been discussed a MILLION times before but
anyone mind if we do it again?

I use ULEADS web razor suite of programs (usually) to reduce graphics for me
which does a great job but it FRUSTRATES me no end that I cant reproduce the
quality of the graphic MANUALLY that it produces..

For example....I have just reduced some CorelDraw 9 vector graphics by
turning them into TIF files via photopaint the typical starting size was
1550Px x 1154 Px @ 300 DPI...now obviously each one of these would have
taken like an HOUR to download so A LOT of reduction was necessary but they
were very good quality graphics....

I started by converting them to 256 colours then reducing the DPI down to
96DPI and then reduced the size to what I needed (around 450Px wide) this
produced the size files I needed but the graphics looked absolutely LOUSY.

After playing for a while with other settings I ended up doing just a 50%
resample as a full colour TIF in Photopaint and then opening the file in
ULEADS Smartsaver pro and further resampling to 450Px wide....the resultant
file was SMALLER than the one I had originally produced from Photopaint but
looked much MUCH better.

My question....

Is there a particular way one should resample a graphic in a paint program?

Why cant I get the same quality by doing it manually...am I doing something
wrong?

I've been doing this for a couple of years now and it has always puzzled
me....
( By the way I am talking about the QUALITY of the graphic ....everything
was in the proper proportions wasnt sqeezed up or anything)
Over to my Bettors.....

Thanks

Tom Keatley

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