Using the Jpg Wizard

Paint Shop Pro's JPG Optimizer is a terrific tool that has alleviated the necessity of a plug in or other software to optimize jpg images.

You can get to the JPG Optimizer from the File menu. File>Export>JPG Optimizer. You'll need to have an image open when you do this.

When the jpg optimizer dialog first opens you will be on the Quality tab. You'll need to watch carefully here as the higher number you set for the compression value the lower the quality of the image. The file size will also be lower but much of the time the trade off is not worth it. You can move the preview around to check it out by left clicking you mouse and dragging in the preview window.

The next tab is the format tab. As with GIF images you can choose to have the image download one line at a time or in passes. Standard downloads one line at a time, while Progressive makes successive passes until the image is fully downloaded.

The Download Times tab shows how long it will take your image to download at different connection speeds. If you feel the download time is too long you can go back and alter some of your choices.

If you just don't want to do it manually as above you always have the option of using the JPG Wizard which has a button on the bottom of the Optimizer dialog.

You can choose the quality of the image.

You'll then see a preview of the choice you made. Not very good looking above (although very small file size) so I'll go back and change the quality setting to maximum image quality.

Now the image below looks much better. Take note of the change in file size. The most compressed above was 2,573 bytes while the least compressed is 84,888 bytes. Quite a difference. I could probably have gotten that a little smaller by playing with the slider until I reached a compromise between image quality and file size.

If you just want to save an image as jpg, you can go to File>Save As and choose JPG as the file type. On the bottom right side of the save as dialog you will see an options button. If you click on that, the following dialog will open. Options that you set here will stay until you change them. So, in my set up I have compression at 15. Every time I save a jpg, unless I change these settings, all jpg images will be compressed to 15% and will be saved with Standard encoding.

Copyright Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved