This is getting to be a real conundrum, and I appreciate any suggestions:
When creating JPGs or GIFs for the internet, obviously my greatest concern is not how they'll look on my own monitor, but rather how they will look on thousands of other monitors. My question is what are the best general colour management settings for either CorelDraw or PhotoPaint when exporting to JPGs or GIFs -- without creating files of enormous proportions?
First off - set your working units to pixels so that you can scale your vectored image down to the correct size - in pixels - that you require. Also be cognizant of page size - set your page size to the pixel dimensions you require and then fit your artwork on the page so that nothing hangs beyond the boundary of your page.
When exporting make sure you export only the current page.
That should be a good starting point to get your file sizes down.
Use sRGB as your working colour space because that's what your browser - and everybody's browser for that matter - wants. Don't use AdobeRGB or ProPhoto or CMYK colour space. Be prepared for unpredictable results if you do.
Thanks for this, but I wouldn't try to export anything more than the exact item, let's say a photo, for instance, in its exact web-ready size. So there's no issue about the content I'm exporting or its dimensions.
My concern is with colour management settings, and specifically the selectable export destinations. If I choose "Optimize for the web", then "colour management for files being exported" is automatically shut off. What's active in that mode is CMYK Printer and colour separations. That doesn't make sense at all, since I gather that files exported to JPG or GIF or PNG absolutely don't belong under printers or colour separations.
If I choose "Optimized for professional output" the file size created is humongous. If I create my own profile, the results are usually a toss-up between bad colours or bloated files. And this is why a little guidance from others more experienced in this area would go a long way. Thanks again.
Terremoto, I forgot to mention that I didn't know that about using sRGB, and I will do that immediately.
Oh, and one other thing. If I choose "Optimize for the web", the import/export settings (for sRGB) are ignored. Another reason that makes no sense.
Gus, let me ask - which option are you using to export? Export, or export for web?
It almost sounds like you're using straight export.