Creating animated graphics with ImageReady is a relatively straightforward process, but unless you are creating an extremely simple animation, you'll save yourself a lot of time and frustration by using a specialized tool like Ulead's GIF Animator. GIF animation tools offer a variety of features and effects that you won't find in apps like ImageReady and Fireworks.
These tools not only make it easier to create animations, they also allow you to create more effective and better optimized animations (for example, the animation in Figure 2 optimized with GIF Animator uses only 8.4 KB whereas with ImageReady it occupies 12.8 KB). Two areas of animation where ImageReady does excel, however, are in its ability to import a folder as a group of animation frames and the ability to make a group of animation frames from an existing set of layers -- two features not available in most GIF animation tools.
Figure 2. The ImageReady Animation Palette
Features in the current release of ImageReady include support for Photoshop API filters; editable/scalable text (a new feature in Photoshop as of v5.0), tweening (a cool morphing-like feature that blends aspects of different images, creating interim instances with transitional attributes), the ability to create client-side image maps (by assigning URLs to layers in an image), two adaptive color palette controls (straight adaptive and perceptual, which weights colors for human sensitivity and significantly improves quality in most cases), a lock button on optimized color palettes that allows you to "lock down" specific colors so that they won't be dropped when reducing the overall number of colors, and a Web shift button for automatically shifting a specific palette color to the closest Web-safe palette color.
Additional features include a Droplets tool that allows you to drag and drop a batch of files and have them automatically compressed using a set of user-defined options, a history palette that keeps track of every compression scheme you've tried for an image and allows you to step through previous versions to compare image quality, a browser dither view that simulates the preview of a browser on an 8-bit (256 color) display, automatic rasterization of Illustrator and other vector-based image files, gamma preview and correction capabilities that automatically account for differences between viewing images on Windows and Mac platforms, and automated image slicing capabilities (allows designers to split an image along user-defined guidelines for more precise layout control on the Web).
