Adobe ImageReady A Web Graphics Companion for Photoshop Forrest Stroud
Photoshop is the premier imaging software app, but it has always been geared more towards print media -- i.e. publishing images in advertisements, newsletters, magazines, etc. Rather than incorporating a complete set of Web graphics tools into Photoshop, Adobe decided to develop the standalone ImageReady client instead. While many users might prefer to have ImageReady's set of Web tools built into Photoshop, one advantage to keeping them separate is that Adobe will be able to release ImageReady on a faster development cycle, insuring that users have the latest tools at their disposal for the always rapidly evolving Web.
The 1.0 release of ImageReady includes several new features added since the beta releases, including improved color reduction for better optimization, support for the recently released Photoshop 5.0, the ability to import a folder as a group of animation frames (with support for Adobe After Effects), the ability to make a group of animation frames from a set of layers, and extensive online help documentation.
As part of its support for Photoshop 5.0, ImageReady also offers Layer Effects, one of the new features in the latest release of Photoshop. Much like Fireworks' LiveEffects, Layer Effects allow you to apply effects like drop shadows and bevels to an image layer, and then any time the layer is modified ImageReady will dynamically update the effect as well.
One particularly useful feature in ImageReady is that when you select any pixel in an image, you are not only given its RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) values but also its hexadecimal value and its X and Y position in the image. The hexadecimal value is valuable if you want to blend a graphic in with a background color on a Web page. If you've been using Photoshop or a similar tool to create Web images, you've probably had to open a third-party utility or an HTML editor like HotDog Pro in order to find the hexadecimal value of a color. Thanks to ImageReady, no longer will you have to leave your graphics program in order to find a color's corresponding hexadecimal value. Macromedia's Fireworks offers a similar feature except it shows the RGB values or the hexadecimal values but not both at the same time.
