Photoshop 5.5 also serves as a major upgrade for the premier graphics design application. Two additions in particular stand out -- the integration of ImageReady 2.0, a complete Web design tool, and the new Save for Web feature. ImageReady will be described in more detail shortly, but for now let's turn our attention to Photoshop's Save for Web feature.
Save for Web makes it easy to dynamically preview and optimize graphics for the Web in GIF, JPEG, and PNG formats (with a variety of configurable settings for each) via the LiveView window first seen in ImageReady. With LiveView you can display various versions of an image in side-by-side windows and compare each image's quality and file size with the original image, allowing you to create high-quality Web images with the smallest possible file size.
Additional new features in Photoshop 5.5 include:
· New Lossy GIF feature (makes GIF files 10-50% smaller), · Background Eraser for smoothly removing backgrounds in an image, · Magic Eraser tool for erasing solid-color backgrounds in an image, · Art history brush for painting strokes in the style of a painter, · Extract Command (extracts foreground objects from their background), · Contact sheet capabilities (with thumbnails of an image), · Support for v1.3 of Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), · and much more.
For a complete list of new features in Photoshop 5.5 (and ImageReady 2.0), check out Adobe's Photoshop 5.5 New Features PDF file (2.5 MB).
