This is a beginner-level tutorial to introduce you to rollovers, layers and animations in Adobe ImageReady 2.0. This assumes you'll be creating a very simple animation from within ImageReady itself. In fact, it's quite easy to import a movie as animation frames to use in a rollover/animation sequence. But let's take this dumber approach for now. (Incidentally, some might say this is the hard way to do things. If you think so, I invite you to write your own tutorial for this site.)

Step 1. To start it off, create a new document with three layers (Layer 1, Layer 2 and Layer 3). Layer 1 will be your background. In this example, I've chosen to use a night sky created with KPT 6 SkyEffects. You can use anything. In the foreground, Layer 3, I've placed a masked-out image of Jeff Bolkan, producer of Digital CAD and Digital DTP, for no particular reason, other than his views of the Macintosh differ from mine, which, of course, is unacceptable. Layer 2 is where we'll create our animated sequence, starring me, masked out, making a victory symbol slightly over Jeff's head level. Place the masked-out image (of me, in this case) in Layer 2 and move it off screen (or whatever starting position you'd prefer). Before you go on, make sure you have your optimization selected from the beginning. This will save you trouble later. For the sake of argument, select GIF 128 Dithered from the pull-down menu in the Optimization Pallet.

It's very common that one has to use an image for printing taken from the internet. These images are usually small in size and you can clearly spot the jpeg compression in form of small squares. If you wanted to use such an image for printing, you can either use them in only very small size or the above mentioned squares will be visible. Obviously it's better to avoid using low res jpeg images for printing, but sometimes we can't avoid it. With the following procedure you can enlarge and improve your image slightly, so that it becomes printable. It can never be sharp and detailed, but at least it will not be jagged.

By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.

Developing images for the web (or for distribution through a web browser) is tricky in that you have to walk a fine line between having beautiful graphics and having images that load quickly. The larger the image (memory-wise), the longer it will take to load, and the more impatient your user will get waiting for it. In addition, you can't use just any file format for the web, you have to use one that is compatible with browsers and html. Currently, you have two file format options for web images, GIF and JPEG.

This sample video clip from Total Training features a quick review of one of the new tools that have been added to Photoshop CS3 - the Count Tool.

In this Photoshop CS3 video tutorial you will learn the following:
 Where to find the Count Tool
 Uses for the Count Tool
 Working with the options bar when using the Count Tool
 How to change the color of the Count Tool
[click on the screenshot below to launch the video]