Big image: jpg or png?

Question

I'm making a site which has as a banner a 1000x375 image. Which format is recommended for this? (in terms of downloading/displaying times)

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 20 '10 at 00:02

1

Completely depends on the composition of the image.

Vector-style image with clean lines and lots of uniform areas of colour (e.g. a screenshot of some Windows explorer screens)? PNG

A complex photograph with harsh lines and lots of detail? JPEG

Gaussian-blurred photograph with plenty of smooth gradients and some big fonts over the top? PNG.

Test your images and find the optimal format and compression settings to get your desired blend of image quality and file size. It's not as simple as 'PNG or JPEG'.

answered Aug 20 '10 at 00:02

Chris Thorpe

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It's more of a photo (shows in-game screenshot of a videogame I'm creating) – Gabriele Cirulli Aug 20 '10 at 00:12
Almost certainly JPEG. But test it out. If it's for a header graphic and you're overlaying text, you'll probably want to blur it up some. – Chris Thorpe Aug 20 '10 at 02:28

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 20 '10 at 00:01

Try it and see. Whichever one makes the smaller image will be faster to render the full thing.

If the image is going to be massive nomatter what, I would suggest saving it as JPG with progressive rendering enabled, so that the user gets a fuzzy version, then a better version, etc, rather than waiting for it to render line by line.

That said, 1000x375 is not a big image. I have a 300Mb TIFF if you want to see a browser have a heart attack...

Big image: jpg or png?

2 Answers2