Any tips for optimizing photos for Flash?

[azukizero]

I'm curious if anyone has any great tips for preparing photos to be used in a Flash website.

I'm very familiar with Photoshop and I've designed many non-Flash sites so I know the general approach for preparing photos for the web. I've done a few Flash sites which are heavily image based... no images galleries but just large photos used in the layouts.

In the interest of keeping the file size down to a minimum, I'm bringing the quality of my jpegs down to 45 or even 30 in Photoshop (this usually makes them around 40K +- 10K each). Needless to say, they lack the sharp quality of a good image when brought down to this size.

Lately, I've seen some really great Flash sites that have very large images in their layout The photos are very clear and the site moves smoothly/quickly.

So, I guess my question is two-fold:

1) What can I do to maximize the quality of the photos without compromising the speed of the site?

2) As a general rule, what is the range of quality for photos brought from Photoshop into Flash? (jpeg, psd, gif?)


thanks for any insight!

[mrand01]

I don't know much on this topic, but I do know we export our photos as jpegs from imageready, not photoshop. WOuldn't seem like it makes a difference, but it does.

[azukizero]

thanks, mrand01.

Actually, this is something I just recently noticed. I'm using CS2 and when I 'Save for Web',
the top of the "web saving window" says something like Save for Web Powered by ImageReady.

I only remember that because it seems weird for Adobe to promote ImageReady through Photoshop...

I assume this is the samething as going directly through ImageReady to optimize for the web but I could be wrong. Are you guys actually opening up ImageReady and preparing photos that way?

[mrand01]

im pretty sure we just click Save for Web...im not positive though, I only take care of the programming around here.