This is a powerful and quite useful feature, allowing you toĬolors that you don’t want to change under any circumstance (for example, the colors in a company’s logo).
It usually increases file size.įor the ultimate in color control, Photoshop lets you edit the GIF color palette. Although it’s nice to have these options, avoid using dithering if you can. It also allows you to set a dithering percentage, so you can vary the amount of dithering in your image and see how it affects image quality and file size. Photoshop 5.5 offers three different dithering effects. One way to approximate a more expansive variety of colors is through dithering simulating a color by placing dots of two other colors close together so that from a distance, they appear to be a third color. Photoshop 5.5 gives you an impressive amount of control over GIF images’ characteristics.Ī limited color palette may make a faster-downloading image file, but it can also make a deathly boring one. In order to make a GIF look good, then, you need to pick the right colors for the job. Unlike JPEG files, which use millions of colors, GIF images are limited to a palette of only 256. Some of Photoshop’s best new features involve perfecting GIF images. By clicking on the window’s 2-Up or 4-Up tabs, which let you compare two or four versions of your image (with different JPEG and/or GIF options selected) in the same window, you can quickly compare different settings. As you move the Quality slider toward 0, you’ll see the quality of your image dropthe more compressed a JPEG becomes, the more blocky image artifacts you’ll seebut in the lower left corner of the window, you’ll see its file size drop as well. In the Save For Web window, you can scale the level of quality (from 0 to 100) for files in the JPEG format. This won’t be exotic to anyone who has used Macromedia’s Fireworks (see the screen shots, “Separated at Birth”), which offers an almost identical interface. Choosing Save For Web doesn’t bring up the usual Save dialog box instead, a large window appears that lets you modify your image in various important ways. The biggest addition to Photoshop 5.5 is the Save For Web menu item, located on the File menu. As a result, prepping graphics for the Web often involves constant switching between Photoshop and a Web-savvy application. However, none of them are able to match Photoshop’s all-powerful image-editing features. These tools allowed designers to manipulate the file size and quality of JPEG and GIF images, with immediate visual feedback. ), or programs such as ImageReady and the $199 Fireworks 2.0 from Macromedia (800/457-1774,
Until this newest version, Photoshop lacked that control, so most designers instead used Photoshop plug-ins, such as the $50 ProJPEG and $70 PhotoGIF from BoxTop Software (662/263-5410, The more control designers have when making trade-offs between beauty and speed, the better. Careful tweaking makes all the difference with images saved in either of these formats. Web designers work primarily with JPEG files (for photographs) and GIF files (for text, logos, and other graphics with large blocks of solid color).
With Web graphics, you’ve always got to walk a tightrope between creating high-quality images and making ones that download quickly over slow modem lines. It handles higher-end tasks, such as Web animation, and other fancy techniques, such as using JavaScript rollovers and image slicing.
Sure, this $129 upgrade for owners of Photoshop 5.0 or ImageReady 1.0 ($610 for new buyers)which will be available by the time you read thisadds some features that will be attractive to Photoshop’s traditional-print fans (see the sidebar “Not Just for the Web”), but the bulk of the changes to the venerable image editor are meant to satisfy the long-suffering Web-graphics community.Ī new version of this program, ImageReady 2.0, will be bundled with Photoshop. ) has never been particularly Internet-savvya situation that has led to the creation of a whole industry based on plug-ins and programs that perform the vital jobs that Photoshop simply doesn’t do.īut as of version 5.5, Photoshop has finally embraced the Web.
Despite all that, the flagship product of Adobe Systems (800/492-3623, It’s probably the most popular tool used by people in the Web-design and -graphics businesses, whether it’s to shape images for the Web or to sketch out a Web-site design before implementing it in HTML code. When it comes to the Web, Adobe Photoshop has always been a program fraught with contradictions.