Saving lots of layers for uploading????
 

Okay, so a few of my recent layouts that I have posted to the gallery have looked very grainy. Most of my pages have lots and lots and lots of layers. To get a great crisp image I usually flatten, reduce the image to 500 pixels and save as a JPEG which is under 250kb.

Recently using this process I have been unable to get the image under 250kb, the page has too many elements and layers and takes up to much memory even when flattened. So I have been using the save for web tool in photo shop but this is producing grainy pics such as the following...
https://www.sweetshoppecommunity.com...March-2013.jpg
https://www.sweetshoppecommunity.com...age-1.gif?8586

Can anybody recommend any better way, so my gallery pics are crisp and not grainy :) Please HELLLPP....

(If you are looking at these now and saying they are not grainy - it's because all the lovely ladies below helped me work out the problem and I re-uploaded the images :)

I'm not a wiz at this kind of things, but here's how I do it
flatten - resize to 700x700 pix - save for web - optimize to file size 249 K

It usuallu turns out ok, with a resolution of at least 72, often times higher.

You could bump up the contrast before saving for web so that it pops a bit more. The most common ways people do this when saving for web is by using a high pass filter, and/or adding a curves adjustment layer with a slight S curve just before flattening.

There's a tut on the blog about high pass filters, and I'm trying to link you directly to it, but it's not working at all. So, sorry to make you scroll but go down to Day 6:
https://www.sweetshoppedesigns.com/i...011/05/page/3/



When you have specified the exact number of pixels (e.g. 600 x 600 or 700 x 700) the resolution is completely irrelevant. Resolution is the number of pixels per inch, but inches only matter when you're printing. Your monitor is going to display 700 pixels as 700 of its pixels, which for most monitors, is 72 per inch. But if you put something higher in the resolution field, it's still going to display the same 700 pixels in the same 700 of its pixels. No change.

Pedantic moment: it doesn't matter how many layers it once had once it's flattened. It could have just been one layer all along, but if it's a really complicated layer with lots of interesting visual information, it's not going to compress as nicely as a solid kraft paper would have. More layers increases your chances for having lots of interesting stuff on the page, but technically, the layers aren't the issue.

Thanks Lorry for the link found it easily by scrolling down and will try that system next time I finish a page.

Thanks Hanna as well :)I possibly have not been changing the resolution to 72, so that might have been my problem as well?

No, if you told it 500 pixels then the resolution doesn't matter, as I wrote before.

This is what I do when I save for web (mind you, most of my photos are from my iPhone, so not the best quality in terms of that, but they aren't grainy):

Flatten layers
Resize to 700px
Unsharp Mask: 300-500%, threshold: 0.2%
Image/Adjustments/Vibrance - bump up to 5
Save for Web: optimise for file size 245kb

Yeah I was thinking that Lorry, because after posting I then thought I have changed the resolution to 72 in the past and it made no difference to the size of the file :(

Ok so thank you to everyone... what I was doing wrong when saving to web was....

I would flatten and then go into save for web - I missed out on the resize step.

In save for web in the past I just changed it from a 3600 page down to where the file size was just under 250. I changed the image size first this time, so when I opened save for web it was already 700 and luckily I didn't have to do anything else as it was under 250kb.

So thank you one and all, I am now HAPPY :) and love that we have this forum to help each other out, although recently I am the one needing all the help!

(I swapped the image - March 2013 - in the gallery but not sure if the first one here reflects the difference as when i went back into this thread the image still looked the same, it is better in the gallery though?)

It's probably just your browser's cache showing the old image. So glad you figured it out! Yay! :)

Oh it was also that I saved them with different file names so I had to re-edit my first post as when I refreshed they actually disappeared. I am soooo happy I got this worked out YEAH!!!!