Planet Photoshop

Need To Shrink The File Size? Use Transparency

March 23, 2007 by Corey Barker Tip of the Day Leave a comment

Want a killer tip for squeezing even more size out of your GIF Web images? Make something transparent. That’s right, if you can pick an area of your image to make transparent, your file size will drop like a rock. For example, if you’re putting a logo over a white background and you can make the white area around the logo transparent, your file size will be significantly smaller, because the transparent areas are virtually ignored when determining file size, because, after all, there’s nothing there.

Posted by Corey Barker

Corey is the newest education and curriculum developer for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. He is a graduate of the Ringling School of Art & Design in Sarasota, Fl, with a degree in Illustration. Over the years, Corey has worked as a graphic artist in a variety of disciplines such as illustration, commercial design, large format printing, motion graphics, web design and photography. His expertise in Photoshop and Illustrator have earned him numerous awards in illustration, graphic design and photography. Using Photoshop since Version 2, his expertise and creativity have evolved exponentially with every new version, which makes Corey an invaluable addition to the NAPP team.