Perhaps the greatest advantage to Photoshop 5.5 over previous versions is it's ability to optimize images for the World Wide Web. Probably the first thing you should do when using Photoshop 5.5 for webpages is to click on the color picker to show the color palette(see above). Select "Only Web Colors". This will limit you to websafe colors that can be seen roughly the same no matter what computer is viewing your page. Also, notice(above) that Photoshop 5.5 gives you the hexadecimal number of the color so that you can match a font color(for example) to your image color.

For printed material, you usually do not care about large files sizes and want the greatest quality possible. For web pages, you want the file size of images to be as small as possible yet maintain good visual quality. To save an image for the web, go File...Save for Web(see left). You will be presented with several choices. Play around with them until you find an acceptable image at the lowest possible file size.
For GIF images, there are several adjustments you can play around with, but a couple I recommend are:

• Colors: This has the most dramatic effect on file size. Minimize the number of colors until just before the quality of image declines.
• Interlaced: Generally you should always check this. The main exception to this is when you are preparing animations! This setting allows your GIF's to gradually fade in as the webpage is loaded.
• Image Size: The smaller the physical size of the image the less KB it uses.

For JPEG images: Check Progressive as this allows your JPG images to fade in. Usually Medium quality is what you will choose for a webpage, but experiment with both the pulldown menu on the left and the Quality slider on the right. Image Size: Remember to crop your photos. The smaller the physical size of the image the less KB it uses.

I have found that I get better image quality at a low file size(optimization) using Photoshop 5.5 and the above technique rather than Image Ready, but you also may want to open up your image in Image Ready 2.0 to see what you can do with it. You can jump(see right) back and forth between the two programs easily. Of course, in either program, when you "Save for the Web", your original image is not changed, you are creating an optimized duplicate.

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