I’m using FW 5 and importing graphics which have already been optimised for the web in Photoshop CS3 Extended. I’m speaking in particular about jpgs. In spite of setting the quality to 100% (either in the Inspector or in the Prefs), FW5 still insists on ‘re-optimising’ the images on publication and they don’t look as good as the imported original, with edges of type, in particular, looking slightly darker than the infill colour. FW 4 used to leave these images alone and they always looked good.
The solution seems to be to import them as pass-throughs only. Is that right?
Sometime around 27/5/08 (at 10:14 -0400) madmacstoo said:
FW 4 used to leave these images alone and they always looked good.
The solution seems to be to import them as pass-throughs only. Is that right?
Pass-through is one solution. If you don’t import an image as a
pass-through, it WILL be regenerated during the publish process,
which means reapplying a lossy compression process from scratch.
That’s just how JPEG compression works.
Freeway 4 didn’t work any differently, so there must be something
else happening here, some difference in settings at some point. Can
you provide an online example of an image that exhibits visible
damage that has been created by Freeway’s compression when the
quality is set to 100%?
I suggest you consider saving your images as PSD, TIFF or PNG (at
millions/24-bit) rather than using Photoshop’s Save for Web feature.
Then use Freeay’s own optimising controls to fine-tune the
compression/quality trade-off while checking out the appearance right
there in your final layout.
If you have a JPEG image, saved at whatever quality setting you like,
and you re-save it as 100% quality, you will not get the same image
back, or even a copy of the image at the same quality level as the
original. You will most likely get back an image which is both
visually degraded AND larger in file size than the image you started
with. You will see this same result no matter what application you
use to do the re-compression.
Walter
On May 27, 2008, at 10:37 AM, Keith Martin wrote:
Can
you provide an online example of an image that exhibits visible
damage that has been created by Freeway’s compression when the
quality is set to 100%?
I’m using FW 5 and importing graphics which have already been
optimised for the web in Photoshop CS3 Extended. I’m speaking in
particular about jpgs. In spite of setting the quality to 100%
(either in the Inspector or in the Prefs), FW5 still insists on ‘re-
optimising’ the images on publication and they don’t look as good
as the imported original, with edges of type, in particular,
looking slightly darker than the infill colour. FW 4 used to leave
these images alone and they always looked good.
The solution seems to be to import them as pass-throughs only. Is
that right?
Absolutely. Import them as pass-through, and Freeway will leave them
alone, same as in FW4; nothing’s changed there.
Thanks, everyone for the helpful information. Sadly, I don’t have any online examples to show as yet since my current project is the first one I’m creating with FW5. Sorry Keith.
Pass-throughs certainly have proven to be one way of ensuring quality and I’ll be happy to experiment with PSDs and TIFFs but I’m still slightly cautious about PNGs (I was gobsmacked to find that over 55% of visitors on a particular site I’ve developed, which includes a smattering of PNGs and PHP, are still using IE5!)
Sometime around 27/5/08 (at 11:48 -0400) madmacstoo said:
Pass-throughs certainly have proven to be one way of ensuring
quality and I’ll be happy to experiment with PSDs and TIFFs but I’m
still slightly cautious about PNGs (I was gobsmacked to find that
over 55% of visitors on a particular site I’ve developed, which
includes a smattering of PNGs and PHP, are still using IE5!)
Ouch. Yep, that’s a good thing to remember. BUT… here’s the ray of
sunshine for you: what you import to Freeway does not dictate what
you get in the final output. You can place PNG, PSD, TIFF, PDF, EPS,
etc onto your pages in Freeway, and it will still automatically
generate web-optimised JPEGS and GIFs for you.
(BTW, DON’T try to import non-web formats as pass-through! It’ll
work, but browsers won’t be able to show them properly. Apart from
Safari, which is cleverer than most and will give you a false sense
of security.)
You can choose to output PNGs if you like, but that’s not an
automatic thing. So don’t worry, just use the best working or
archival format for your originals and let Freeway optimise them for
the web as part of the publishing process.
And remember, you can adjust their output quality, and with the
Graphics Preview turned on you can see exactly how the compression
levels will look right there in your page.