by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

Let's own up to to one of the facts of Web design: Photoshop doesn't compress images for the Web very well. Neither does ImageReady. In fact, if anything, these applications seem to compress worse and worse with each new release. So what do you do? Well, you can go out and buy Macromedia's Fireworks. It's the undisputed leader in compression, and it's a full-blown image editor and Web graphics creation tool to boot. But not everybody wants to shell out the bucks for another image editor, even one like Fireworks that can do so much more than image editing. The other option is ProJPEG, a plugin for Adobe Photoshop whose sole mission in life is to make your JPEGs smaller and cleaner.

What is it?
ProJPEG, from BoxTop Software, installs in your Photoshop Plugins folder and simply appears as an option in the Save As dialog box. When you save a file as a ProJPEG image, a dialog box appears giving you a lot more options than you find in the standard Photoshop JPEG dialog.

ProJPEG's save dialog shows a live preview of the image to be
compressed and provides options like Huffman code optimization
and varied compression for the background and foreground.

The first thing you'll notice is the live preview window side by side with a window showing your original image. The preview actually gives you a live view of the final output before you commit to saving. Previews can be zoomed in on, and you can resize the whole dialog, which also scales up the window sizes.

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