| Upgrades
drive me crazy. Adobe upgrades drive me to the brink of violence. I am
a die-hard Adobe fan who lives and dies by PageMaker and Photoshop. But
it seems like every six months they come up with an upgrade package that
costs a gazillion dollars. I resist. I fret. I rarely upgrade. I've been
using Adobe Photoshop 3.05 because I paid almost $700 for it and spent
months mastering all its tricks and quirks. Why shell out close to $200
for an upgrade that will just throw another steep learning curve in my
path? And the next upgrade is just around the bend?
Photoshop 5.5 finally lured me in. It comes bundled with ImageReady
version 2.0. Let me say it once: If you design websites, you must have
this program. It was worth every penny — many pennies — that I paid for
it. Image Ready does four things that are indispensable to web designers:
Web Optimization, Rollovers, Image Slicing, and animations. This review
is just of ImageReady — PhotoShop deserves a review of its own.
Optimization
Two keys to great websites are crisp graphics with fast download times.
I'm a graphics-intensive designer so this is especially important to me.
ImageReady’s optimization makes web graphics smaller without compromising
on quality. Best of both worlds. It's a snap to use. You open up any graphic
in ImageReady, and then click on the one of the Optimize tabs. You can
display only the optimized version, or a "2-up" display, which shows the
original and optimized version side-by-side. You can also show a "4-up"
display, which presents you with the original and three optimized variations.
You can look at every conceivable variation on the fly, without corrupting
the original image. If the pre-set options they offer don't meet your needs,
they are infinitely customizable to test every trick that can be used to
make graphics smaller. When you find the one you like, just save it, and
the original image remains intact.
In every example I tried, I cut the file size at least in half without
any compromise in quality. In some instances, I cut the file size by as
much as 3/4. The peaceCENTER’s video store has 24 box shots on it. Originally,
the box shot of Judgement at Nuremberg was 16K, which took 2.4 seconds
to download. Not much, you say, but multiply that by 24 you have a download
time for that page of almost a minute with a 56kbps modem. The reduced
size — which looked just as good as the original — was 4K. Download time
for the entire page is now less than 15 seconds.
I can reduce graphics size myself: experiment between using a GIF or
JPG, decrease the color count, dither or not, interlace or not, mess around
with the compression quality. This can take a long time and I still might
not get an acceptable quality or the smallest possible file size. ImageReady
makes this entire procedure swift and foolproof.
If you want your pages to load fast, or if you have a limited amount
of web space, this feature is indispensable. It would also be useful for
people who put together slide presentations in a program such as PowerPoint
— smaller is better!
Rollovers
You've seen rollovers before. When you glide your mouse over a button,
it changes. Very cool, and very tedious to produce. Image Ready makes it
easy. Create your basic graphic — a button, let's say, in its static state.
Then move into the rollover mode. Indicate the ‘slice" you wish to change,
duplicate the layer, and add the new effects. ImageReady automatically
generates an HTML document that contains the JavaScript needed to make
the rollover work, and saves the layers as separate images. The images
are very small, another boon. I always felt rollovers were more trouble
than they were worth, but this feature changed my mind.
Slices
Slices are an alternate way to create image maps, which are large graphics
that have clickable areas. The advantages to slicing up a large image instead
of using a traditional image map are that it can be displayed on all browsers,
is more accessible to people with disabilities and can incorporate rollovers.
I have a separate little freeware program (Picture Dicer, available from
www.ziplink.net/ shoestring/
dicer0l .htm) that will do the slicing and dicing for me, so the slicing
feature alone is not that significant for me. The real beauty is how it
integrated with the rollover feature, so that you can have a huge graphic
that changes in different areas as the mouse rolls over. This is awesome.
I would never invest the time to do this manually.
Animation
The animation feature produces an animated GIF. It would replace a
standalone product such as GIF Construction Set or a product, such as the
Animation Shop which comes bundled with JASC PaintShop Pro. Image Ready
uses layer-based animation, so you modify each layer and the program automatically
creates an animation. It also allows "tweening," which permits a single
element to fade in or out. You can import movies in MOV, AVI, FLIC and
PICT formats and turn them into animated GIFS. This is by far the easiest
and most powerful GIF animation program I have tried.
Other features
One feature I really like is the option of limiting colors to the 216-color
web optimized palette. This is a surefire way of making sure you avoid
colors that won't display properly. There is also seamless movement back
and forth between ImageReady and Photoshop, and the interfaces are identical
so your skills are easily transferable. There are a few other features
that I haven't sampled yet, such as a tilemaker filter to create seamless
background tiles and creating hard-edged transparencies in GIF and PING
images, which eliminated the dreaded "halo effect." As I fiddle with the
program I'm bound to discover even more useful tools.
Learning the program
The program comes with an excellent manual and a separate CD of step-by-step
tutorials. There is now a photo and graphics editing SIG (third Wednesday
of the month) that uses Photoshop, and Adobe has promised us copies of
the program for the lab so we can start hands-on classes.
System Requirements
This is not for wimps. You will need a Pentium or faster Intel processor;
Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT 4.0 or later; 64 MB of
available RAM; 125 MB of available hard-disk space and a 256-color (8-bit)
display adapter (24-bit color recommended). It ran fine on my 450 MHZ Pentium
II with 128 MB of RAM.
Availability
ImageReady used to be a stand-alone product, but now it only comes
bundled with Photoshop version 5.5. For registered owners of Photoshop
5.0 or ImageReady 1.0, an upgrade costs $199 and you get a $70 rebate in
the box. For registered owners of Photoshop 4.0 or earlier, the upgrade
cost is $199 and you don't get the rebate. Note that the upgrade will not
work with Photoshop limited edition, which you might have got bundled with
a scanner or digital camera. You need the full version to upgrade.
Full cost is $649 for Photoshop 5.5 and ImageReady 2.0. I found the
full version online at PCMall for $528 and the upgrade for $169, so it
pays to shop around. This is a popular program and should be available
wherever good software is sold. More information can be found on the Adobe
website ; you can call Adobe toll-free at 800-833-6687 or write to
them at Adobe Systems Incorporated, 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, California
95110-2704.
Susan
Ives, a former president of Alamo PC, designs web pages. |
