Macromedia
Fireworks 4
A Powerful Web Tool
by Rick Smith (February 23, 2001)
 Fireworks Selective JPEG compression menu
 Example of selectively compressed JPEG. Car (rear of $125,000 Mercedes 600 V-12) and sign (ChicagoLand Speedway) are lightly compressed while the rest of the image is at maximum compression - Click to see dramatic difference (56K)
The JPEG file format has been quite helpful for the Web. Just imagine how much bandwidth we would need to view the simplest of pages, if we only had the BMP or TIF file formats. As monitor screens are getting larger, image dimensions are increasing to fill that space. People also want to see greater detail and in great clarity so image sizes are soaring in size. While fractal compression technology can easily solve this problem, it will be awhile before the majority of the browsers support this format.
For now, Fireworks allows you to set the portions (you can have several) of the image you want to compress "lightly" and which portions (generally the background) you can compress into "oblivion". Ah, if only the JPEG format supported transparency as well.
Copyright
© 2001 Rick Smith All rights reserved.
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