We spent the night having a look at PhotoImpact 5 Bundled Edition and really we only scratched the surface of what this program can do. Apart from creating web graphics very easily, it can also be used for optimising and retouching scanned photographs.

I showed you how to access the drawing and painting tools and mentioned that I had created a few images from scratch over the weekend. I had intended to bring them to class on a disk but I forgot. Anyway here they are. There's nothing spectacular here just a few test pieces, all done in a very short time. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger image

Have a Happy Easter, drive carefully, see you soon. Alan

Hi gang, I am still not feeling the best so Saturday's class will not be on, although the room should be available if you want to come in and use the software.

See you next Wednesday. Don't forget to grab a copy of the PC Authority magazine (see below) and bring your CD to class, we will have a look at some of the features of the program.

The April issue of Australian PC Authority has PhotoImpact 5 BE on the cover CD. Grab a copy Now

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We have spent the last three classes using Fireworks to optimise images and create buttons and other graphics for use on our web sites.

I mentioned in yesterday's class that there are some cheaper alternatives if you can't really afford Fireworks or PhotoShop, they are both very good programs but they are rather expensive.

Have a look at these lower cost alternatives.

PhotoImpact from ULead. This is now at version 7, though if you keep your eyes open, you may still find version 4.2 on magazine cover CD's

Paint Shop Pro from Jasc. I believe that this is also now at version 7. This program actually started as shareware, but became so popular it turned commercial. Many professional's use this program, so it is well worth a look.

Both of the above programs are available in trial versions that can be downloaded from the manufacturer's sites. However they are rather hefty downloads so you may be better off looking for them on cover CD's.

Tonight we repeated the steps involved in using tables, and/or nested tables to lay out the design of the web page and then saving the page as a template, to enable us to get consistency on our web site.

You really need to practise both of those tasks over and over, until you can do them without thinking. When you can do that, you can concentrate your effort into the content of the page and not have to worry about the layout.

Don't forget that you may require more than one template, because depending upon what you are putting on your pages, you may find it too constricting with only one.

This site for example, uses two templates at the moment, although that may need to be increased in the future as new sections are added.

The majority of the pages on my site, use the three column layout (as on this page) however the pages that open when you click on a thumbnail image in the gallery, use a template with only one column. This allows the full width of the screen to be used to display the larger image.

There are a couple of pages on the site, the welcome screen and the class schedule page, that are one off's. They don't need a template because they both have a unique layout that isn't repeated on any other pages (though they do of course, use the same general colour scheme)

The basic rule is, if you are going to have more than one page with the same overall layout, then create a template for it.

Don't forget, that if you need to make a change to the template for any reason, then Dreamweaver can automatically update all of the pages that use that template.

We also looked at the difference between Vector and Bitmapped graphic formats and although Vector formats are generally much smaller that equivalent sized Bitmapped formats, for various reasons we still need to use bitmaps on our web pages.

The key to using bitmaps successfully is to make sure that the image is optimised to get the best balance between image quality and the size of the file, which of course affects the time required for your page to download and display.

On Saturday we will look at how we can use Macromedia Fireworks to optimise our graphics and also, how to re-sample images for creating thumbnails.

Don't forget to bring along any images that you are planning to use on your web site. Either on disk or bring along the photographs and we can scan them in class.

I mentioned that there are many graphic file formats used by various programs, for more information on graphics formats follow these links.

File Formats (not just graphics)

Graphics File Formats (mainly links to other sites)

If you really want to strain your brain, then the whatis.com web site has a section titled every file format in the world. Well I don't know if that is true but it does list over 3000 file formats.