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Photoshop For The Web—Second Edition
by By Mikkel Aaland, Reviewed by Les Benson—April 2000 Big Blue and Cousins Greater Victoria PC Users’ Association Newsletter—Web Edition www.bbc.org/ , editor@bbc.org - June 16, 2000 at 11:50:19:
Adobe’s Photoshop has long been the program of choice for preparing images for print. Using it for web work would seem straightforward. However, preparing images for press and for the web require different techniques. In O’Reilly’s Photoshop for the Web, author Mikkel Aaland offers guides and examples that are designed to allow both the amateur and advanced user to get the most out of Photoshop when preparing images for publication on the web. The book contains twelve chapters.The first chapter describes how to configure Photoshop’s preferences to optimize it for the web rather than for print that it was originally designed for. Typical of the helpful advice the author presents is his suggestion against choosing Photoshop’s Optimize for Web Use. While that setting produces colours that more closely correspond to most display systems, these colours are Photoshop specific and are not supported in ImageReady or other applications that the file may be opened in. Rather, the author suggests users choose Photoshop’s Imitate Photoshop 4 color handling.
Other topics include calibrating colour and reducing file size by such simple techniques as turning off image previews and Photoshop 2.5 compatibility. (Leave Photoshop 2.5 compat-ibility on if the file is to be used in PageMaker though, that is all PageMaker supports.) An interesting tip I was not aware of, but found useful was how to change Photoshop’s default gray window to a different colour. (Choose the foreground colour you prefer, shift-click the paintbucket in the gray area.)
The second chapter covers basic editing of images. I liked the way the author interspersed tips aimed at the expert with tips that are applicable to beginners as well. A typical example: Work from a copy of an original high-definition file so the original can be used for other purposes.
When an image is being prepared for the web, one of the first decisions to be made is “GIF or JPEG?” While JPEG has become accepted as the image format of choice for photographic images on the web, it has also been accepted that the GIF format is better for images with a limited number of colours. Unfortunately, real-life is not that simple. As an indication of the depth of coverage of this book, it devotes four chapters to a discussion of producing and working with GIF and JPEG images. Again, the amateur is not neglected. Basic advice applicable to all — like every time a JPEG image is saved, detail is lost and the file size may increase, is offered.
Chapters on Background Tiles, Adding Type to Images, Navigational Graphics and Importing Vector Graphics follow. As with other chapters, simple tips for the beginner and more advanced tips for the more experienced user are presented. For example, the author suggests that if you produce vector-based images with Illustrator, Freehand, or CorelDRAW and want the best quality conversion, save the file in Adobe Illustrator EPS file format and let Photoshop rasterize the graphic.
The next chapter, Laying Out Pages in Photoshop shows that Photoshop isn’t just an image editing tool. Photoshop’s support for layers makes it an effective page layout tool particularly for producing glows, beveling and embossing of the layer’s contents.
The final chapter discusses Adobe ImageReady 2.0, which is included with Photoshop 5.5. ImageReady was initially introduced as a stand-alone product, but it would appear that Adobe listened to the complaints of its users (including myself) who suggested its basic controls should really be included in Photoshop. Adobe not only listened, but also added a new option to Photoshop, Save for Web that duplicates many of the web optimizing controls found in ImageReady. They also included a copy of ImageReady 2.0 with the program. So should the user use Save for the Web or ImageReady? The author suggests that users stick with Photoshop 5.5’s Save for Web for image optimization and use ImageReady only for specialized tasks like slicing, animation, and rollovers.
There are also two appendices, one covering the relatively new PNG image format and the other covering third-party software that some users may find useful to handle specialized tasks not easily performed in Photoshop.
I have tried to highlight just a few of the simple tips the author provides. There is far more to the book though. What makes it so valuable is the detailed description of techniques used by experienced web artists to produce superior graphics. Many of their examples are shown in a 64-page full-colour section that enhances the description with full colour examples.
Once again, O’Reilly has lived up to their reputation and produced an excellent book. See O’Reilly’s page for details on the book including an index, table of contents, and a sample chapter (Chapter 3, Making Great GIFs). If you are at all serious about image editing for the web, you should really own this book — it is an essential tool. Highly recommended.
Photoshop for the Web By Mikkel Aaland 2nd Edition November 1999 1-56592-641-2, Order Number: 6412 246 pages, including 64-page color insert, $29.95 ($US)
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