I have spent the past few weeks building myself a website for my art and articles and have used this program extensively. One of the important features of this program, for me, was its ability to let me balance my images for quality and speed of download. Actually, I started my web site after the demo version had expired and before I had received the full version. When I first published my website, I found that my download times were, in my opinion, too long. So I scrapped my files and started again. This time I brought all of my PSD, (Adobe Photoshop) files into ImageReady. One can go back and forth between Photoshop 5 and ImageReady. I reviewed each image to decide on the quality I needed. The range is from 0 to 100. For the purpose of this article, I did a comparison of times for downloading against image quality.

I used an image with a lot of details and created a file 316 x 216 pixels at 72 dpi. I then saved this file at many different settings and compared them visually. I found that I could be very well satisfied with qualities in the low to medium range. As an example, ImageReady allows the user to signify which speed of modem will be downloading the files. Even though I use a 56k modem, I chose a hypothetical speed of 28.8 for both my own work and this comparison.

File Type	Size	Quality Setting	Download Times In Seconds
Photoshop 5 psd	205 k	--------	--------
PS 5 jpg	18 k	2/10	"guestimate" 7
PS 5 jpg	91 k	10/10	"guestimate" 35
ImageReady (IR) jpg	6 k	2/100	3
IR jpg	8 k	Low (10)	3
IR jpg	13 k	Med (30)	5
IR jpg	24 k	High (60)	9
IR jpg	40 k	Max (80)	15
IR jpg	84 k	100/100	31

I then compared all of the above images to the original image. What I found was that, at 100% magnification, I never had to go beyond the ImageReady jpg generated at medium (30) quality. The three settings that I deemed gave me a balance between quality and performance were the jpg generated from Photoshop 5 at a setting of 2, the ImageReady jpg at a setting of low (10) and the ImageReady jpg at a setting of medium (30). Both the files generated in ImageReady were smaller than the one generated in Photoshop 5.

Aside from optimizing file sizes, ImageReady is geared to prepare graphics and text for cross-platform environments and for many types of browsers. For example, if one is working on a Window's machine and wants to see how the image will look on a Macintosh, one can click on the following chain of menus: Image/Adjust/Gamma/Windows to Macintosh. One can also see how it will look on various browsers without having to exit the program..

Some of the features of ImageReady are: multiple undo; color palette management; LiveView windows so changes can be seen immediately; color correction through gamma, (non technically) brightness manipulation; animation palette for animating GIFs; easy maneuverability between ImageReady, Photoshop, and Illustrator; batch processing; and much, much more.

The interface is very similar to Photoshop 4 and 5. With minor variations, the tools that are used often in Photoshop are reproduced in ImageReady. The minor variations are negligible - one example is the crop tool. It is not present in ImageReady; instead, the marquee tool is used with a crop command. Adobe has included the ability to add another plugin directory to the native plugins.

ImageReady also has a number of different types of color palettes including adaptive palettes for PNG-8 files, Mac OS system palettes for GIFs, and a perceptual palettes for Gifs and PNG-8s. These encompass only a few that are available in this program. ImageReady contains a browser dither command and the ability to copy color in HTML code.

Many file formats are able to be opened in this program including FlashPix (.fpx), Filmstrip (flm), Kodak Photo CD, PDFs, and many more. One can, also, import folders as frames, scan from the program or do a quick edit. One can, also, export an image as an html, as a path to Illustrator, as a GIF 89a, etc.

There are a list of undocumented features that can be found in the readme file of ImageReady. Some of these are: Support for Photoshop 5 layer effects, different types of anti- aliasing for type, a watermark strength readout, a polygon lasso, automatic creation of evenly spaced guides, a window's ImageReady registry cleaner to reset all default settings, and more.

Since I mainly deal with images created from photographs, I mainly used the features that pertained to the creation and optimization of JPEGS files. Everything I tried worked smoothly and easily. The more I used this program, the more I found myself relying on it and not going back into Photoshop 4 or 5.

For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here