[Pro] Is Dreamweaver Superior to Freeway Pro?

Freeway
1

I built a small site for a designer in Freeway Pro. She gave me PSD files which had background gradations which Freeway didn’t handle well, there was too much banding. So Freeway Talk community members suggested using some Noise in PSD to decrease the banding. That helped. The site was finished and published.

Now the designer has had the same site with the same PSD files built by someone else in Dreamweaver. The Dreamweaver version is showing much more brilliant colors on the same artwork, almost as if they are backlit transparencies. Also, the gradation in the page background seems much smoother than how Freeway handled the same file.

Is Freeway Pro having trouble matching the image quality of a site built in Dreamweaver? Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Thanks,

Patty

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2

Freeway uses a less processor-intensive image resampling technique
known as bilinear sampling, versus Photoshop’s more impressive bicubic
sampling.

Freeway is constantly resampling your images when you resize them,
crop them, etc., so this time savings is an investment in your
everyday working speed.

For many images, it does a fine job and there’s no need to “sweeten”
the images. But for those cases where this compromise cuts too deep,
what I like to do is make the layout in Freeway, get everything
looking the way I want it to, then open the Freeway-generated art in
Photoshop, drop the full-resolution original on top of it, and
resample the image in Photoshop – to size – and use the Save for Web
feature to create the final art.

Back into Freeway, select the image you want to replace in your
layout, and import again, this time targeting the Photoshop-generated
original and checking the Pass Through checkbox in the import dialog.

Now the trade-off is that you can no longer change the dimensions or
any other aspect of the image except its position. But the benefit
will be that you get the full power of Photoshop to make your
production images.

Walter

On Apr 1, 2010, at 4:10 PM, chickdesign wrote:

I built a small site for a designer in Freeway Pro. She gave me PSD
files which had background gradations which Freeway didn’t handle
well, there was too much banding. So Freeway Talk community members
suggested using some Noise in PSD to decrease the banding. That
helped. The site was finished and published.

Now the designer has had the same site with the same PSD files built
by someone else in Dreamweaver. The Dreamweaver version is showing
much more brilliant colors on the same artwork, almost as if they
are backlit transparencies. Also, the gradation in the page
background seems much smoother than how Freeway handled the same file.

Is Freeway Pro having trouble matching the image quality of a site
built in Dreamweaver? Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Thanks,

Patty

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3

Thank you, I’ll try that.

Patty

On Apr 1, 2010, at 2:08 PM, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

Freeway uses a less processor-intensive image resampling technique
known as bilinear sampling, versus Photoshop’s more impressive
bicubic sampling.

Freeway is constantly resampling your images when you resize them,
crop them, etc., so this time savings is an investment in your
everyday working speed.

For many images, it does a fine job and there’s no need to “sweeten”
the images. But for those cases where this compromise cuts too deep,
what I like to do is make the layout in Freeway, get everything
looking the way I want it to, then open the Freeway-generated art in
Photoshop, drop the full-resolution original on top of it, and
resample the image in Photoshop – to size – and use the Save for
Web feature to create the final art.

Back into Freeway, select the image you want to replace in your
layout, and import again, this time targeting the Photoshop-
generated original and checking the Pass Through checkbox in the
import dialog.

Now the trade-off is that you can no longer change the dimensions or
any other aspect of the image except its position. But the benefit
will be that you get the full power of Photoshop to make your
production images.

Walter

On Apr 1, 2010, at 4:10 PM, chickdesign wrote:

I built a small site for a designer in Freeway Pro. She gave me PSD
files which had background gradations which Freeway didn’t handle
well, there was too much banding. So Freeway Talk community members
suggested using some Noise in PSD to decrease the banding. That
helped. The site was finished and published.

Now the designer has had the same site with the same PSD files
built by someone else in Dreamweaver. The Dreamweaver version is
showing much more brilliant colors on the same artwork, almost as
if they are backlit transparencies. Also, the gradation in the page
background seems much smoother than how Freeway handled the same
file.

Is Freeway Pro having trouble matching the image quality of a site
built in Dreamweaver? Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Thanks,

Patty

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4

You may also find that saving images as 24-bit PNG from Photoshop’s
Save for Web - or setting Freeway’s output to PNG at ‘millions’ of
colors - will give you better results for smooth, subtle graduations.

Do you have examples of both pages? We could probably give you
precise answers if we could see the ‘before and after’ examples, as
it were.

k

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5

To quote Walter “Freeway uses a less processor-intensive image resampling technique known as bilinear sampling, versus Photoshop’s more impressive bicubic sampling. Freeway is constantly resampling your images when you resize them, crop them, etc., so this time savings is an investment in your everyday working speed.”

Freeway needs to change. Let there be slowness. It’s more important to produce beautiful pages in Freeway than to speed along and turn out crappy work. Taking extra steps to make beautiful pages in Freeway is my single biggest complaint about Freeway. At least give us an option in preferences to make things faster and worse, but make the default out of the box slower and better.

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6

Sometime around 4/4/10 (at 17:08 -0400) cosjr said:

Freeway needs to change. Let there be slowness.

It isn’t just a matter of slowness. When we get down to this level it
is sometimes a matter of selecting specific output options, to the
point of preferring one interpolator over another for certain
operations, and using one file format over another too.

I’m not saying change is wrong - just that it isn’t necessarily quite
as simple as it might seem. :frowning:

Anyway, I’d still very much like to see the specific page mentioned
in the original post. I’m wondering whether PNG graphics were used
strategically, and what file sizes we’re talking about.

(BTW, do try switching to PNG at millions if you’re getting banding
in JPEG graduations. And convert your original images to the sRGB
colour space too. Using Adobe RGB-tagged images is good for print,
but it is a sure-fire way to get dulled output for the web.)

k

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7

(BTW, do try switching to PNG at millions if you’re getting banding
in JPEG graduations.

By this I mean selecting your image in your Freeway page and
switching the output setting in the Inspector palette.

And convert your original images to the sRGB colour space too.

This woud be done in Photoshop. Prior to saving your original images
in non-lossy format before importing them to your Freeway layout.

k

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8

Also I believe that in - document set up/graphics in Freeway 5 pro, you can set options so Freeway does not touch the imported graphics…

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9

@Justin - Yes that’s right. I just set png to millions of colors. Now does that mean that drag and drop png’s will place as millions? That will be easier than playing the import/pass through shuffle and certainly easier than making sure the size is just right before import.

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10

Sometime around 6/4/10 (at 18:34 -0400) Justin Easthall said:

Also I believe that in - document set up/graphics in Freeway 5 pro,
you can set options so Freeway does not touch the imported
graphics…

Nope. What you can do is click the Passthrough checkbox in the Import
dialog when importing your images.

Patty, I’d still like to see the page or images you referred to in
your original post. That would help us give you truly specific and,
hopefully, useful feedback.

k

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11

I just set png to millions of colors. Now does that mean that drag
and drop png’s will place as millions?

Nope.

It is important to note that - unless you use the Passthrough
option (and put up with the limitations it brings) - what format you
import has NO affect on what you output. [*]

If you want PNG at 24-bit in your output, set it that way in the
Inspector palette. And for your original images, just save them in
native Photoshop PSD format.

Setting the Document Setup > Graphics option for PNG to Millions
doesn’t seem to make any difference here. But while that needs to be
fixed (if it isn’t my own mistake somewhere) it really isn’t
difficult or fiddly to set it that way manually.

k

[* Other than 8-bit images defalting to GIF and 24-bit images
defaulting to JPEG.]

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