Freeway optimizes any image you import through the normal graphic box container, unless you check the “pass-through” option in the File / Import dialog. You can control the degree and type of optimization/compression using the Image Inspector, which you will see whenever you have selected that graphic box (corner handles showing) in the design view or clicked on its name in the hierarchical page contents list in the left sidebar (show items selected in the cog menu).
If you import an image as pass-through (and anything you have prepared to size as Richard notes should be treated this way) then you rely on that external app for any modifications to the image. For certain types of image content, this is the absolutely best way to get the most image quality for the least file size. And you should care about this. But you should be selective about when and how often you go to this length.
Many images are well-served by Freeway’s native compression tactics, and don’t benefit much from the hard-core tweakery you can get up to in Photoshop. And your design will benefit from putting this step off to the very last, simply because it’s such a drag on your creativity to open a native PSD and re-crop, and re-export, and maintain all the versions in case you or your client wants to roll back a change.
When you use a normal (non-pass-through) image, you can do all your cropping and scaling and adjusting directly in Freeway, where the original image is never altered in any way, and all the versioning is taken care of directly inside Freeway’s graphics engine. (Freeway just stores a “recipe” for converting the original into your desired image, it doesn’t do anything to that original, and whenever you make a change, it throws out the version it made previously and replaces it with a brand new version made from scratch.) You can change things as often and as much as you like, and never worry about the images as you are working out the bones of your design.
Once you’re done, and the client has paid the second third of the fee, and you’re in the home stretch of “sweetening” the finished site, you can take a critical eye to your images, decide which ones don’t look their best, and try to re-do Freeway’s crop and scale and compression in another application – one that gives you more levers and dials to adjust. No question, in the right hands, Photoshop does a visibly superior job of compressing images, especially those that have particular features that JPEG tends to destroy, or those that are scaled to a large degree (bi-linear interpolation in Freeway vs. bi-cubic in Photoshop).
But save that for the very last, and don’t get mired in these details while your layout is still in flux.
Walter
On Mar 8, 2014, at 2:51 AM, Jim Feeney wrote:
The images I use on each page are, in the original, typically about 3mb. I crop them to select that portion of the image that I want to post to my webpage. Then I use an online image optimizer before importing that cropped, optimized image to my page.
My question: Is that online optimizer an unnecessary step? If I cropped the original and imported that directly into my page, does Freeway 6 Pro have the capability to optimize it to about 25K, without my using that intermediate step of an online image optimizer?
A sample page of how I use the images would be How to Marry Well | Tips to Find the Right Spouse for You
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