Hi me again - I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this but before I spend ages loading images into my site is it better to bring in, say, a Photoshop file and let Freeway turn it into a gif, or whatever, or use Photoshop’s “save for Web” function - ie which creates the smallest files ? Regards Roger
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On 20 May 2008, at 11:17, Roger Burton wrote:
Hi me again - I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this but before
I spend ages loading images into my site is it better to bring in,
say, a Photoshop file and let Freeway turn it into a gif, or
whatever, or use Photoshop’s “save for Web” function - ie which
creates the smallest files ? Regards Roger
If you use Photoshop’s ‘Save for Web’, you’ll have to use pass-
through images in your site. That means that you can’t do anything
else with them, like resize, rotate, etc, or apply any of Freeway’s
effects to them. If you bring in .psd or TIFF files and allow Freeway
to make the JPEGs or GIFs from them, you’ll have a lot more control
over them without having to go back and forth between Freeway and
Photoshop. I don’t know which method produces the smallest files;
I’ve never looked 
If you select your picture and turn on ‘Graphics Preview’ in the
‘View’ menu, you can adjust the compression of the JPEG that Freeway
will make with a slider, while viewing the effect on-screen, which is
handy.
best wishes
Paul Bradforth
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Sometime around 20/5/08 (at 12:41 +0100) Paul Bradforth said:
If you bring in .psd or TIFF files and allow Freeway
to make the JPEGs or GIFs from them, you’ll have a lot more control
over them without having to go back and forth between Freeway and
Photoshop. I don’t know which method produces the smallest files;
I’ve never looked
That is actually very difficult to tell; there is no single
accepted standard for the numbers in the JPEG quality scale. What you
would need to do, if you wanted to make a true comparison, would be
to generate a JPEG from each that came to the exact same byte size,
as near as dammit, and then make a careful (but still subjective)
decision about which looked best. I suspect that you wouldn’t find a
quantifiable difference.
Scaling is something that Photoshop can do better, but many people
find that the difference is usually not worth bothering with.
(Although I’d still be overjoyed if a future version of Freeway
implemented something like Photoshop’s Bicubic Sharper resampling
option.)
And of course it is always worth reminding people that importing
JPEGs NOT as pass-throughs means they will be compressed again during
the standard publishing process from Freeway. This applies another
round of lossy compression, which is never a great thing to do.
If the originals are already in JPEG format, so be it. But if any
further Photoshop work needs to be done, DON’T save them out once
more as JPEGs! Save them in a non-lossy format - TIFF or PSD, or
24-bit PNG for Freeway Express users - and import those to Freeway.
If you select your picture and turn on ‘Graphics Preview’ in the
‘View’ menu, you can adjust the compression of the JPEG that Freeway
will make with a slider, while viewing the effect on-screen, which is
handy.
Handy is sometimes a massive understatement!
Being able to make quality judgements about graphic compression
levels while looking at the item in place, actually in the page
layout can be seriously useful.
k
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On 20 May 2008, at 13:05, Keith Martin wrote:
Scaling is something that Photoshop can do better, but many people
find that the difference is usually not worth bothering with.
(Although I’d still be overjoyed if a future version of Freeway
implemented something like Photoshop’s Bicubic Sharper resampling
option.)
Oh YES!
best wishes
Paul Bradforth
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Thanks, as ever, chaps I’ll do some experimenting but yet again I can see real benefits in letting Freeway do the work ! Best Roger
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