Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Use Web Graphics Tools

Nearly all commercial graphics programs—both bitmap image editors and vector drawing programs—include some function for saving or exporting graphics in GIF and JPEG format. But if you are serious about creating high-quality images at small file sizes, it is highly recommended that you invest in a tool with web-specific features, such as Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady or Macromedia Fireworks. If you work on a PC and are on a budget, you might want to try out Corel Paint Shop Pro , which has many of the same features as Photoshop, but at a much lower cost.

Without a doubt, the de facto standard for creating web graphics is Adobe Photoshop and its web-specific sidekick, ImageReady. Since Version 5.5, Photoshop has included many web-specific features such as a Save to Web option that shows previews of your graphic in different file formats and at different compression rates.

The other major contender is Macromedia Fireworks, which has similar web graphics features as ImageReady with the addition of vector drawing tools. As this book goes to print, the fate of Fireworks is unclear as a result of Macromedia’s acquisition by Adobe.

One of the greatest benefits of using these tools is that they offer previews of your optimization settings (even providing side-by-side comparisons), so you can make adjustments to the settings while keeping an eye on the resulting file size and overall image quality. Both offer very similar controls for file format, color depth, palette ...