Use Stock Icons for navigation and site notices! Here's a site, A-1 Clipart Archive, that can help you find icon images! Read the usage agreements and any license agreements before using `Free Graphics'! Commercial sites may need to pay a small fee and many sites require a link somewhere on your pages!

Q. What do you use as a Paint Program?

A. I use a bunch of different graphics programs but iPhoto Plus (version 4) came with my scanner and I do like it a bunch! The recommended programs by the Web Design experts are PaintShop Pro and either Microsoft's or Adobe's Professional Imaging programs!

For format conversions (jpg to gif to bmp) and such I like Alchemy Mindworks' Graphics Workshop Pro but if you want to do various painting, and image work without investing a huge sum in one program you'll probably end up with a collection of programs somewhat like mine with each one doing just one or two tasks and one favorite that does almost all the work! Don't forget Microsoft's 'Paint' that comes with all the versions of Windows!

Graphics is not my strong forte so others may steer you to even better tools and the guys who design MTM tracks and trucks will have special tools for those tasks also. I like hardware so I buy hardware and just use the software that comes with the hardware! Your mileage may vary!

When designing graphics you'll want to consider the colors you use. There are 216 colors that are considered "safe" on the Web. Click here for a Web Safe Pallet Color Chart.

Q. please tell me what settings I should scan at, what programs I should use to crop (I have Ulead Photo Express : v 2.0 I think), and how to save them as a smaller dpi

A. Actually, you don't really need to worry that much about the dpi while your having problems. I use the reduced dpi to make my image files smaller but it's not really required. Just one of the tricks I use to run fat websites in smaller, faster loading spaces.

Anyway, scan the picture, at 300 to 600 dpi. This gives you some extra definition while you crop, re-focus, straighten and adjust the image. Now, crop it to center the subject or as you wish. Adjust your contrast and brightness. Try a focus touch up if you wish. Adjust the color and do any hand painting or touchups you want and/or add any text.

The Monster Truck Banner Exchange!

BTW: The extra definition will also help if you need to do any detail touchups like removing items such as a Telephone pole or even a person from the picture. You can use the old Graphic artists trick of blowing the image up and doing the touch up there then re-shrinking the image again.

Once the picture looks good on your screen, Hit the resize and set the image to the number of pixels you wish it to span in each direction. You can use percentages too but thinking in pixels is the way to go. The majority of all web browsers are at or below 800 pixels wide so set your images smaller yet. I go 600 or less. Covers WebTV and the Win3.1/DOS and elderly UNIX boxes and older browsers too that way.

When you resize, there should be a second tab or button also and if you hit it you'll be allowed to change the dpi. This helps shrink the file since the extra image bits won't be used anyway over the web. Now save your file using the "save as" button or selection. There is a options selection under "save as" in most imaging programs with one option to set the amount of compression vs image quality.

JPEG format is a "loosey" compression so set the quality number high around 80 or better. You can resave to a different file name also with lower settings to see if the image is still acceptable. Use your browser to view the images since the photo programs render differently from a browsers abilities.

Now upload to your host. Don't resize the image in the HTML code or web site builder program if you can help it. Your visitors have to download the whole image before the browser can show it all so shrinking a image in the code means they "pay for" image quality they'll never see. Yes, visitors "pay to view" your site by spending their time waiting for your site to load. Stretching a image in the code doesn't always hurt but can look bad, also. Your code should ideally declare the actual image size in the "IMG SRC tag" line. This speeds up the load but again isn't really necessary.

If you need to stretch the image in the browser (code) a little then use a 96 dpi, 150 or even 300 dpi image to regain the quality a little. Once more to recap ....scan the image, crop to suit. adjust. resize (to the desired working size) then save to high quality. Everything else is an experiment. Ain't webmastering FUN??