Roo — Tue, 14 Mar 2000 16:40:00 +0000

I have a full size image background that's only 19KB and if I fade it it goes down to 11KB.(The pic is enlarged as well)See here:
http://pages.cthome.net/hayescraze/nav.htm This one isn't faded very much.

The trick in in gamma correction and blurring.

Take your picture and enlarge it to betweem 500 and 600 pixels, depending on how big you want it.

Blur it as any times as needed so that text can be easliy read.

Play around with gamma corrrection until you have the desired lightness.

The lighter the image is the smaller it will be...that's becuase it's heavt color that makes it large. ie: a gif can contain a mas of 256 colors where as pic that needs to be a jpeg can contain millions. The less intense color pixels that need to be read the smaller the file size.

Tiling is difficult with this:

I used Flaming Pear's Tessalation filter on this....you can download it from Flaming Pear. If not then feather the edges a lot so that you you can make it seamless.

You can also use a paintbrush set to lighten RGB to lighten the edges to avoid the tileing problems.

If you have lighted and blurred enough you can get away with higher compression when saving without atrifacts.

Roo

cds — Sat, 11 Mar 2000 23:11:00 +0000

Just for the record though, fixed background doesn't work in NS, only in ie 4.0+

Dan

vy22 — Thu, 09 Mar 2000 10:58:00 +0000

Hi,

Large backgrounds are not that big! I use them all the time. The secret is to load the image up in say 1024x768 and align in on the page so that it looks ok in 800x600 this can be done by tweeking the canvas so that the image is in the top left corner. Also to make it smaller turn down the contrast and turn up the brightness in something like photoshop or Paintshop pro. Turning up the brightness reduces the size of the image as there are not so many colours to worry about.

Save the image as a jpg and turn the quality right down. It will still look good and will not take that long to load. I do reccomend using the fixed background as suggested above or you are going to get ugly lines when the surfer scrolls down. Also make sure the bg colour is similar to the image.

~Vy~

greet_me — Wed, 08 Mar 2000 06:11:00 +0000

Another suggestion for using a large graphic as a background - in order to keep it from tiling, add a tag in your code that keeps the background FIXED - that way, the text (or other contents) of the page scroll, but the background is static.

Here's how: (BODY BACKGROUND="something.gif" BGPROPERTIES="FIXED")

Hope this helps.

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"This would be funny if it weren't happening to ME!"

NSS — Sat, 04 Mar 2000 04:39:00 +0000

Correct me if I am wrong.

If you want to use any text as background, you must convert it to an image and use http://www.spinwave.com to check your image size and at the same time reduce the image file size and you can also view the image quality at this site.

I am not sure of your total page size or the performance, but you can check it at: http://www.websitegarage.com

This utility will provide you a full report of your page's performance.

Hope this helps

NSS

[This message has been edited by NSS (edited 03 March 2000).]

bilbong30 — Sat, 04 Mar 2000 04:27:00 +0000

What if i just want to put like text in the background? Like big letter text of like a slogan. Would that really bog the load time or no?

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Adam
adamlee@mediaone.net

NSS — Sat, 04 Mar 2000 04:18:00 +0000

In my opinion, it's no a good idea as such a large image for a backgroud would easily amount to 100-150k and it will really slow down your loading time.

Although you can reduce the size to almost half by using image compression(http://www.spinwave.com) but it will affect the image quality.

Maybe you can experiment with the BODY tag like:

From my experience, a 40-60K page would do well downloading your page to the visitor's browser using the slowest modem speed, or you can expect the visitor's next option is the back button.

NSS

[This message has been edited by NSS (edited 03 March 2000).]

bilbong30 — Sat, 04 Mar 2000 01:30:00 +0000

Ya how do i keep the file size down if i do that?..I just want to put a pretty good size image in a table in the middle of my site? Any suggestions on keeping that file size down so it doesnt take forever to load?

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Adam
adamlee@mediaone.net

Brooke — Thu, 24 Feb 2000 15:53:00 +0000

I like that background look too. If you are going to make a large background like that - does anyone have any suggestions on how to keep the file size down?

Brooke

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Brian Farkas — Thu, 24 Feb 2000 02:59:00 +0000

If you want to make the image not repeat at all, I would recommend 1600x1600. Or, you could make it smaller if you just wanted to set it as the background for a table cell.

Brian

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