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PhotoImpact4
Part 3
By Scott Clark
SmartSaver is a time saver!
I saved the image as a JPEG, and it ended up weighing in at 8K. It was even larger as a GIF, weighing in at 12K. Enter the Ulead SmartSaver utility. If you're creating an image for use on the Web, you simply use the SmartSaver (available right below SaveAs from the menu) to save your image, and it automically reduces the file size using compression and color reduction. You can move the slide bar to adjust the level of compression. After I used the SmartSaver on the image, the image weighed in at a scant 4K without much of a noticable loss of quality!
image in GIF format: 12K
image in JPEG format: 6K
image in JPEG format after SmartSaver: 4K
Another component of PhotoImpact is the Ulead GIF Animator. The GIF Animator visually enables the developer to create animations and banners by simply importing them into the GIF Animator. You set the background color, time intervals and specific area that the image will be positioned. You can instantly access all the options available for an image by right clicking on the image while it's in the image display area of the animator. Need some banner text? Right click and choose add banner text (See Figure 3).
Figure 3: Creating a banner ad using Ulead GIF Animator.
Without going into a separate review of the GIF Animator, suffice it to say that the tool is very extensive (it can add fades, swipes, and many different transitions with a click of a button), and you can go as far as you'd like with it. It's a step up from the GIF Construction Kit from Alchemy Mindworks, and about as easy to use.
The biggest requirement if you plan to make professional looking animations is to use decent images which are small in size, so do your homework ahead of time. The nicest part of the GIF Animator is the Optimization Wizard. The Opt Wizard compacts the animations by removing unused colors and redundant portions of each image layer. This tool can reduce your hulking monster of an animation to a reasonable, compact animation which will enhance, rather than distract from, your Web site.
And you mean there's more?
Even with all these features, Ulead PhotoImpact4 still has more hidden under the hood, including:
- a library of 3,000 photos, 250 GIF animations and 42 Web page style templates
- a frame maker tool which enables you to create slick frames to surround your images
- an "EasyPalette Edge Gallery" which enables you to "cut" images out with the selected edge
- warping, noice, 2D, 3D, rotation and other and transforming tools
- the ability to place fog, smoke, fire, bubbles, snow, etc. in your images with a click of a button
- paint, eraser, trace, fill, clone and other standard paint tools
- image map HTML tool
- screen capture program
- customizable toolbars
PhotoImpact4 is a tool that, even after a year of use, you'll still be finding new things you can do with it. The shockingly low price, combined with more features than you're even likely to think of, make for a tool that will be used often in the Web developer tool kit. If you're looking for an all-around Web graphics tool, look no further than PhotoImpact4. Just hope your competitors don't get their own copy...
This article first appeared in March, 1998.
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