How to Save Images for Web and Devices to Get Small File Sizes in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to use Save for Web and Devices saving option to get the best size and quality value for web or device images.

01. Lets say you’d like to upload a banner, a picture, a header, signature picture  or any other graphics to a website or to some device but the picture is too large in size and either the website doesn’t allow you to upload a picture of such size, it loads/uploads too slow or for any other such reason. Some way you’d have to make the file size smaller. But how? This image, for example, is 385 KB large and is too much for some websites and will load rather long.

02. To save the image to a smaller size, just go from the Photoshop menu to File – Save for Web.

03. A new large window will appear with all sorts of options. First, you need to decide into what you’d wish to save your image. Save for Web offers you 5 options – gif, jpeg, png-8, png-24 and wbmp. Most common of these are gif, jpeg and png-24.

04. Now you have some other options. On the upper left you can choose how to preview the image, for example, choosing the 2-up will show you the original and the adjusted version, so you can see very well if you are going too far by lowering the quality. The quality itself you can change from the upper right by changing the quality, blur and matte values. Be sure that you lower the quality but the picture would keep its sharpness. From the lower left, you can see how big of a file you are going to get after saving the image.

05. Changing into other extensions, may give you other options to change the quality, but they are all located on the upper right. All the extensions also give you the option to change the image size as in resolution right on the spot on the lower right. If you are done playing around with quality values, you can just  press Save and you are done!

06. Like this you can save your pictures into a small size that fit any website or device without any problems that it wouldn’t load or load too slow or any other problem that such places may have due to space limitations. This kind of saving is only available through Save for Web and a regular Save As is not going to make any difference. We got the picture down from 385 KB to 28,6 KB – what a change!