Photoshop Overview
Photoshop is considered by many to be the "de facto standard" for image editing on the Macintosh, PC, and Unix Workstations (SGI, Sun, DEC, etc.). It's an extremely friendly application to beginners and holds a wealth of complexities inside, even for the most advanced artist. Since it is considered the "standard" we will be discussing ways in which you can use Photoshop to get the most out of your images for the WWW.

Even though I have Photoshop 4.0 in the image above, all of the following examples will use version 3.0.5. However, all operations are still very similar, if not the same.

What will Photoshop let us do? Photoshop gives us the ability to:

  • Save in a myriad of formats including JPEG, GIF, and many others including those that support channels such as Photoshop 3.0 format.
  • Choose the amount of compression for a JPEG image.
  • Choose the number of colors (up to 256) for a GIF image.
  • Save as a transparency GIF.
  • Save as an interlaced GIF.
  • Change image sizes, and anti-alias the image in the process.
  • Find the dimensions of an image - the image height and width parameters.
  • Interface with a scanner to be able to scan directly into Photoshop without having to go through an intermediary application.
  • Touch-up images with precise detail, including correcting bad scans, image color correction, sharpness correction, etc.

In general, Photoshop will let you do almost anything to an image that you need to do. It gives you the tools to optimize your images for the Web, netting you the highest quality image for the lowest file size.