The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

This week we're going to explore ImageReady-Adobe's web graphics editing program. If you have Photoshop installed on your computer, then you also have ImageReady. ImageReady is designed for doing the following:

Animations: Creating GIF files that contain animation and are limited to no more than 256 colors total.
Rollovers: The ability to change the appearance of part of your image when someone moves their mouse over that area in a web browser.
Image Maps: Creating non-rectangular links on an image that will send you to a different web address.

If you have an image open in Photoshop and you'd like to use that image in ImageReady, all you have to do is click on the icon that appears at the very bottom of Photoshop's Tool palette, or type Command-Shift-M (Mac) Ctrl-shift-M (Windows). Any changes you make in ImageReady will be transferred over to Photoshop when you switch back (ImageReady has a similar icon to transfer you back).

Once you're in ImageReady, grab the Eyedropper tool, click within an open image and then drag outside that image and notice that you can pick up colors from anywhere on your screen... from the Tool palette... from another program, etc. Just keep your mouse button held down until you get the exact color you are looking for. If you try the same thing in Photoshop, you'll notice that it can only grab colors from images open in Photoshop.

In Photoshop you can choose View>New Guide to specify the exact position of a new guide. Well, in ImageReady, you can choose View>Create Guides and you'll get a completely different dialog box. In here you can create multiple guides that are evenly spaced, or divide your image into equal parts and more.

If you'd like to add some extra space to your image, choose Image>Image Size and turn on the Relative checkbox. With that checkbox turned on, entering 4 pixels for the width will add 4 pixels to the width of the document regardless of how wide it was to begin with. You can also type negative numbers to crop the image by a specified amount. I use this feature whenever I want to add a two pixel black border to an image and I don't want to cover up any of the existing image. Once you've added four pixels to the width and height, then choose Select>All and then choose Edit>Stroke to add the border.

If you want to move a layer to an exact location in your image, choose Layer>Set Layer Position. Once the dialog box appears, set the pop-up menus to the position where you'd like to move the layer (Left Edge will move the left edge of the layer to the left edge of the document) and then set the offset value to how far from that position you'd like the layer to be (Left Edge with an offset of 10 will move the left edge of the layer so that it's exactly 10 pixels away from the left edge of the document).

Here's how you can create a slide show animation: Put all the images you'd like to use in a single folder and make sure they are the same size (width and height in pixels). Choose File>Import>Folder As Frames to combine all those images into a simple animation. Next, choose Select All from the side menu of the Animation palette and then click on the delay time listed below one of the frames (it usually is marked '0 sec.') and choose how long you'd the images to appear before it switches slides.

Animations created in ImageReady usually have to be saved as GIF files, because JPEG doesn't support animation. If you'd rather save your animation as a QuickTime movie so you can use it in Adobe AfterEffects or another program, then choose File>Export Original and choose Quicktime Movie from the Format menu. That way your animation doesn't have to be limited to 256 colors as they are when saved in the GIF file format.

I've developed many weeks worth of ImageReady tips. In the future, we'll spend most of our time exploring tips for Photoshop, but we'll occasionally make the leap and explore ImageReady.

Don't forget to check out this week's Photoshop Questions of the Week at www.digitalmastery.com/questions

-Ben Willmore