Compressing images - maintaining quality?

[dubman]

I saw this site http://bonterra.ca/food.php with apparently very compressed background image, but excellent quality. How is something like this possible? Thanks.

[danieltooop]

hi her is my suggestion,

You will need to use Image Editing software such as Photoshop, Pixelmator, Inkscape, Fireworks, GIMP which contains a built-in feature that will compress your images.
Then there may not be a quality loss..

[dubman]

I use Gimp for compressing .jpg but there is always quality loss. But when I click properties on the background image of http://bonterra.ca/food.php it says the image is only 4209 bytes.

So I'm baffled....

[AlexDawson]

JPEG is a lossy format, if you want something which will have a decent level of compression with a lesser visible amount of loss, use PNG instead, it's a better all round format anyway, I just checked that website and it seems about right for the image, if you have a good editor you should be able to configure color usage and other options (which affect the file size). Other than that there's plenty of tutorials on compressing images to get the maximum squeeze out of it

[dubman]

mmm...I have tried compressing png files in Gimp but they only seem to compress very little. I have one photo which is about 1.5mb. I would like to reduce the file size to 30 kb or less...

The jpg compression does work in Gimp, but there's too much quality loss.

[Slackr]

It also depends on the content of the photo. You'll see that the image you refer to is a selective focus (ie background is purposely blurred), and also contains large areas of similar colour. Both these factors allow you to compress images more easily as the JPG format compresses information by chunking together colours that are similar in colour. With such large areas of similar colour and a blurred background they have more wiggle room than say a detailed photo that contains lots of different colours.