Photoshop and ImageReady

A few years back, Photoshop received a fair amount of flak for its relatively paltry collection of Web-focused features. Adobe explained to Web designers that they were missing the point:

Photoshop was for print graphics and a separate program, ImageReady, was for the Web. But most Web designers ignored this advice and continued to grouse, so Adobe eventually caved, and started to do the right thing.

Beginning in Photoshop 5.5, Adobe's engineers took a bevy of features from ImageReady 1.0 and hot-wired them directly into Photoshop. Then midway into the process they said, "Oh, to heck with it!" and tossed in ImageReady for good measure. The result? Photoshop became more Web-friendly, and we all got a great companion application.

Photoshop CS2  

Since its inclusion, ImageReady has been a mixed blessing. It's a great environment in which to develop animations, rollovers, and general Web graphics, but in pre-CS versions it was painfully slow. It's also inconvenient to switch back and forth between programs (they're so similar to look at, you can forget which one you're in), and having both programs open puts a drain on system resources. Fortunately, Photoshop CS2 is the last version of Photoshop that will ship with ImageReady as a separate application. As you'll discover later in this chapter, one of ImageReady's key capabilities ” animation ” is already integrated into Photoshop's Save For Web dialog box. Many Web graphics designers rarely open ImageReady anymore (if they ever did), and in Photoshop CS2, they may never start the application at all.

Of course, although ImageReady's still part of Photoshop, albeit as a separate application, the most essential Web features ” gamma compensation, compression optimization, color indexing, transparency management, and image slicing ” are included in both Photoshop and ImageReady. This eliminates you having to choose, or dedicated ImageReady users having to wean themselves off of the program too quickly.

So what's the upshot of all of this? This chapter focuses primarily on the one true application that we've all come to know and love: Photoshop. There's no sense devoting a ton of ink to ImageReady, when it's already on the way out and so much of what it was meant to do can be done in Photoshop. Of course, ImageReady still offers its share of unique capabilities, and these are discussed at the end of this chapter. In the meantime, it's all Photoshop.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the myriad methods for preparing images for the Web inside Adobe Photoshop CS2. If you've read all the preceding chapters, you've come a long way, and you're already positioned to put all of what you've absorbed to good use. If you skipped to this chapter randomly or came to it from the index, that's okay too. If something's foreign to you now, you need only flip to the chapter cited as the reference for more information, and then you can come back here when you're ready.