Please give me some simple rules of thumb about preparing graphics for use in dreamwe

Hi,
could you please be a little more specific about your question? I'm not sure I understand it completely- are you asking which program you should use to resize images, etc.? Either one of the programs mentioned should work just fine for those tasks. If you had another question, please feel free to ask.

Thanks,
Brian Farkas

Photoshop by far is the best image editor for creating graphics. 5.5 and 6 both are bundled with Image Ready, so when you optimize with it it's actually Image Ready doing the work.

When you create an image, you can crop, and resize in pixles to the size you want. Size your images with an image editor as opposed to resizing in the browser.

Always, always optomize to get your image files as small as you can.In Photoshop you get a preview window so you can see if a high compression is giving you artifacts (those nasty looking lines around an overcompressed jpegs) or not.
I normally save jpegs in Photoshop beteen 30 and 50 percent, depending on the image.

For gifs....take the colors down to as few as you can get away with without affecting quality. I rarely save a gif at full 256 color.

Save a gif for text images, jpeg for complex, and high color images.

As far as coding:
within your img src tag include the dimensions;
img src="yourimage.jpg" alt="Alt Text Here" height=??? width=???

Is this what you were looking for?

Roo

But dreamweaver should all that height/width stuff for you.

The thing with Photoshop is that it is very expensive - you can get educational versions that are much cheaper though - ask about that when you start your course.

If you're looking for a more affordable solution, Paint Shop Pro is really good - does most of the same things as photoshop (not as powerful, but should be fine for a beginner) and it's much, much cheaper.

PaintShop Pro and Photoshop are both bitmap based eitors - manipulating pixels. Both are including more and more vector capabilities as new versions come out though. (Illustrator, Freehand, Corel draw etc. are based on vectors - using mathematical calculations to create shapes).

Fireworks is, to me anyway, a vector program with some bitmap capabilities. Some people like to say that it's the best of Photoshop and Illustrator combined, but I really see it as parts of both, not necessarily the best parts of both. It's made for web graphics though, so that might be a factor to consider. I don't use it very much actually - I just don't like the way it works for some reason.

What you use really depends on what exactly you want to do and what you feel most comfortable with. Every graphics program has it's pros and cons. The best thing to do would be to download trial versions and see which one works best for you.