This short tutorial walks through the basic steps of optimizing an image that will be used online. At its most basic, optimizing an image for the web is a process that changes the dimensions of an image so that they are appropriate for its purpose, and that compresses the image to a resolution appropriate for screen display. Optimizing an image ensures your image is high enough quality that people are able to see the details necessary, without requiring that they download an image that contains so much information that the file size is large and therefore loads slowly.

The first tutorial is for using the GIMP image editor to optimize and image. The second tutorial explains the process using Photoshop.

0:00 Why Optimize
0:43 Software for optimizing images
1:00 Optimizing images with Gimp
2:58 Compressing images with Gimp
4:50 Optimizing images with Photoshop
5:52 Compressing images with Photoshop