One of the "complaints" of the computer press has been about Adobe Photoshop, that it has not adapted to the need to adjust to the graphic needs of the World Wide Web. We think this is carping. Photoshop is, and remains, the program of choice for graphic designers and we think Adobe, at least at this point, is wise to concentrate on making Photoshop an all-around graphics package while releasing web-specific applications which can more fully address web issues.
   That is what Adobe did with Image Styler (see our review) and what it now does, in spades, with the release of ImageReady.
   The heart of this program is optimizing images. No matter what jazzy graphic stuff is available in the program (and this one has plenty) the rubber meets the road when it comes to making images small enough to download in a reasonable period of time.
   So, when you open ImageReady, one of the first things you see in the familiar Adobe interface is a new palatte for optimizing images. Image Ready will optimize GIF, JPG and the newer PNG formats. Depending on what format you use, it offers a range of options you can play with to get the right combination of speed and quality. Its the best program we've seen for doing this. The way it works is that you set your options and click on an "optimize" tag over the image itself. ImageReady then simply recalculates the size of the image and displays it on a little bar (like the one on the right) at the bottom of your image. You simply play with the settings until you get an acceptable look and then save the optimized file. Because you can click back and forth between the optimized preview and the original image, you can tell very simply how much your image has changed when different parameters are changed. Its an elegant solution to this important function.
   That isn't all, however. Because ImageReady has some excellent animation capabilities (done in a pretty unique way with the familiar layers concept from Photoshop), ImageReady also optimizes animated GIF files. This isn't a run-of-the-mill function: other stan some on-the-web services, we have seen very few programs able to do this. Yet it is so important, especially as animated GIFs become used more and more.
   One of the truly strong points of ImageReady is its Adobe interface. It looks like Photoshop and, indeed, it has many of the graphics capabilities of Photoshop. That means, for the most part, you do not have to jump back and forth to Phoroshop to do things and then load the image into ImageReady to optimize. Chief among the advantages of using the Adobe interface is that all the plugins and filters which you use with Photoshop are also a part of ImageReady. It is a great boon to have these sophisticated functions available within the program itself.
   Animation is really a strong suit with ImageReady. The basics of animation are familiar to everyone, but ImageReady makes it pretty easy to do. What is neat here is that you can animate the most complicated things, even using photographs. It is a major part of this fine program.
   ImageReady also has Adobe's new actions functions, and, in many ways, that is the real power of this program: it has lots of Photoshop things. If you know Photoshop, you pretty well know ImageReady and, while all the tools are not available, most of them are and they work the same.
   So, if you wish to adjust colors, contrast, blur or sharpen, use Kai's Power Tools or Alien Skin's new Xenofex plugins, you do it right from ImageReady and you do it the same way. Add that to the fact that everything you learned about masking and selecting for Photoshop applies in ImageReady, and you have yourself a peach of a program with a short learning curve.
   Finally, of course, you can do all the webbie stuff like image maps, image slicing, adding type and the like. Drop shadows, too. This is a major strength of ImageReady.
   It is a fine solution to your web image needs. Think of it as Photoshop for the web. You'll like it.

   Link to the Adobe web site.