Page Design with PhotoImpact
By R. Shamms Mortier
Any paint or image-processing software can be used to develop content for a Web page, as long as the output is digestible for both the Web and your browser. Wouldn't it be nice, though, to be able to work in a creative environment with tools dedicated to Web-page design that also contain all of the options expected from a high-end image-processing and graphics application? With the new Web menu that's been added to Ulead Corporation's
PhotoImpact 3.01, this has become a reality.
Ulead has positioned PhotoImpact, a Windows-only application, as a graphics-software utility for Microsoft Office. That gives it a certain stature and presence for the community that Microsoft Office targets, but also contributes to its anonymity with other users. This is a shame, because PhotoImpact is a powerful, full-featured graphics and image-editing program. It does things that no other software even tries to do, like instantly layering area fills so they can be moved around on top of an image as soon as they are created. It comes with numerous textures, gradient libraries, and objects, and is bursting with unique image-processing techniques. PhotoImpact writes out to over thirty file formats—including JPEG, GIF, and PNG—making it a great choice for all creative purposes, particularly Web-page design.
In this article, I'll discuss PhotoImpact's new Web Extensions menu umbrella, which includes the Background Designer, Button Designer, Frame Designer, Object Shadow Designer, Shift Image, Align Objects, Space Evenly, HTML Image Assistant, Image Map Tag, helper Program, GIF SmartSaver, and JPEG SmartSaver.<>
