"How to do..." Freeway examples from Mike Sibthorp @ TalkingImages

Prepare Photographs (P+E) Needs Photoshop or similar.
freewaylogo900pxrgb

Freeway has some excellent features for dealing with photographs and graphics. It supports lots of file formats (P) or 24bit png (P+E). Freeway can scale images and makes an excellent job of creating the jpgs for you. However, I am a very fussy photographer and there is one missing feature - unsharp mask - and that is why I prepare my photographs this way. (If you are not quite so fussy or do not have PS there are alternative ideas at the end of this tutorial)

  1. Work out the final size of your image. If you are not sure what it is, draw a gif box, import your image and let Freeway scale it to fit. Note the final box size in the Inspector.
  2. Open your image in Photoshop and make it the correct size at 72dpi. Apply Unsharp Mask and any other corrections you require. (Hint, if you are starting with a big file, do the size reduction in a number of steps, applying USM at each step).
  3. Save as .psd or .tif (P), or as 24bit png (E).
  4. Import this file to your Freeway doc.

Quite often you will find that you are preparing a number of photographs at the same size. Work through the above for one of them and record a PS Action so that you can batch process them.

If you are working with monochrome photographs, convert them to RGB first. Freeway will make gifs by default from greyscale images and, whilst they may look lovely, the files will be huge.

Freeway makes excellent jpgs. The default compression setting (Inspector) is 75 and is OK for most purposes.. If you wish you can set View>Graphics Preview and change the compression, Freeway will show you the result on the fly.

---------

OK, so you don't want to work that way! For more flexibility with scaling your images in Freeway, reduce your files to about twice the dimensions you need and make them 72 or 150dpi as .psd or .png . Freeway now does not have to do quite so much scaling and will make a reasonable job of it.

As a general rule, NEVER import jpgs into a graphics box. Freeway will compress them again and the loss of quality will be dramatic. If you have files that you have optimised in other applications (e.g. Save for Web in PS), they must be the correct size jpg at 72dpi and imported to a blue html box as "passthrough". Freeway will not touch these files and will use them just as they are.

But, you say, my digital camera saves files as jpg . There are two alternatives - go through the optimising procedure above or just import them and let Freeway scale and recompress them. Yes, I know I said "NEVER import jpgs" but your camera files are much bigger than the image size you will use on your site and, in the majority of cases, it will work out fine. You will just have to try one and see if the result is good enough for your purposes.

MS

HOME

Join the Freeway WebRing.

Other useful Freeway sites.
item5