Managing your Web Images
Unless you plan to hire a designer to take care of all the photos and other graphics on your Web site, you’ll need a tool to do it yourself.
Digital photo and graphics editors are available online free, for very basic software, and into hundreds of dollars for sophisticated top-end programs like Adobe Photoshop, pretty well recognized as the professional gold standard.
What you’re looking for is editing software that can resize and crop images; repair problems with color and contrast; set their resolution, which controls how sharp your graphics are on the Web page; and save them using color modes and formats specifically for the Web.
The photo organizer built into your operating system, like Windows Photo Gallery packed with Microsoft’s new Vista, might even take care of your needs.
Unless you really want to get into graphics editing and creating your own unique images and photo illustrations, you don’t need to understand the technical ins and outs. But you should be sure that your choice of software supports all standard graphics formats for the Web, mainly JPEG (jpg), GIF, Bitmap (bmp and others) and Ping (png).