Professional Information Technology-Programming Book part 56 ppsx

Getting Feedback on Styles There are many noteworthy features in Photoshop Web Gallery command, such as gallery styles with the word "feedback" in their name.. Choosing one of these sty

indicate editable fields into which you can enter data (Note that this does not work in Photoshop Elements 2.0.)

Getting Feedback on Styles

There are many noteworthy features in Photoshop Web Gallery

command, such as gallery styles with the word "feedback" in their name Choosing one of these styles creates a gallery with a feedback banner

that appears beneath the large image If the viewer clicks the feedback banner, a two-tab dialog appears One tab says "Image Info" and the

other says "Image Feedback."

If the Image Info tab is clicked, all of the EXIF data for that image

appearsprovided you have told the program to preserve EXIF data If the Image Feedback tab is clicked, an email form appears The viewer can click the email tab, type a name into the Explorer User Prompt dialog, and click OK This opens the viewer's OS-assigned email editor The

viewer can then type an email message of any length and automatically mail it to the address assigned to that web gallery

1 Choose Large Images from the Options drop-down menu in Photoshop (see Figure 12-37) The options presented here tell Photoshop how to resample and resave your existing images for the Web Happily, Photoshop does all the work for you, saving you much time and pain These settings also allow you to customize the look of the currently chosen style For example, you can automatically place borders around the images Note that you can't choose the border color, but you can change the width of the border by entering a specific number of pixels in the Border Size field You will also notice a Titles Use section with several checkboxes This will extract the appropriate EXIF information about the photo and insert it into the title Be sure to experiment to find the settings you like best

Figure 12-37 The Large Images options in the Web Photo Gallery dialog

The Custom Colors tab or drop-down menu options will let you choose any color for the following items: Background, Text, Link, Banner, Active Link, and Visited Link To change a color, simply click the color swatch for that item to bring up the standard Color Picker for your OS, and then follow the standard procedure for

picking that color

The remaining options are self-explanatory and a matter of personal preference You'll often find that the defaults are the best choices for a given style When you click the OK button at the top right of the Web Photo Gallery dialog (regardless of which Options screen is showing), the program will do everything it needs to do to optimize and size both the thumbnail and large images, implement all the options for styling the gallery, store the images in the appropriate folder, and write all the HTML code needed to run the gallery on your web site When it finishes doing all that, your default file browser will automatically open and your web gallery will appear It will behave exactly as it does on the Web

NOTE

Options vary for different gallery styles So if I've mentioned making a change that you don't find in the style you pick, either pick another style or just don't worry about it

I believe it's important to use several different programs for creating automatic web galleries so that you can choose from a wider variety of prefab styles That way, you can get some quick previews of a variety of visual alternatives Most of these programs are quite inexpensive Here's a few that I like:

iPhoto 06 (www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto)

This Mac-only program has a new feature called Photocasting that Windows photographers will really yearn forif you email a gallery to a client and then change the gallery on your computer, it will automatically update on the computer you sent it to Imagine the possibilities

ImageRodeo (www.imagerodeo.com)

This Mac-only program is by far the best and most versatile of all the

products that automatically create web galleries There are 15 templates that you can edit You can also drag and drop to rearrange images in the gallery, delete the ones you don't want, and add your own HTML text and titles Now, if someone would just make a program just like this for Windows,

we'd all be happy Here's the best partsometimes the best things in life really are free

iView Media (www.iview-multimedia.com)

This is a cross-platform, $49 program that does slide shows and web

galleries iView Media pro is $199 and gives you the added benefit of

currently being the fastest and most efficient media management program for Windows

ACDsee 8.0 (http://na.acdsystems.com)

This excellent $49 image management software for Windows lets you create web galleries for both your own and for their own online image sharing service

Thumbs Plus 7.0 (www.cerious.com)

This Windows-only program comes in Professional ($89.95) and Standard ($49.95) versions The program offers easy choices for background colors, generates easily editable HTML, and can be made to publish directly to your web site

Express Thumbnail Creator (www.neowise.com)

Thumbnail Creator is strictly for making thumbnail galleries and uses

editable HTML There's a free trial download The program is $39.95

Ulead PhotoImpact 11 (www.ulead.com)

Windows only; not only does web galleries, but publishes web pages with

interactive slide shows In this latest version, you can edit your HTML galleries with JavaScript enhancements, according to the literature

Ulead Photo Explorer 8 (www.ulead.com)

For a mere $29.95, you get a program that creates web slide shows or web galleries There's a lot of versatility here; you can change the background color of all the elements, choose font styles (but not, oddly, text color), and choose from a number of template layouts There's only one style, but it is very clean and professional looking

Corel Paint Shop Pro 10 (www.corel.com)

This $79.95 package has many useful tricks up its sleeve It will publish a single image to an HTML page, but doesn't create web galleries as a whole

It now comes with what used to be JASC PhotoAlbum, one of my favorites for automatic web gallery creation because it's intelligent enough to use the filenames as image titles without adding the file extension (which is usually one of the main reasons for editing the results of most other WYSIWYG HTML editors) You can also instantly add your own photos as

backgroundsjust make them up in your image editing program and pop them

in The one issue I have is that there's no way to scale the thumbnails and gallery shots; hopefully this will change with the next upgrade The last upgrade added a couple of new features, not least of which was very nice automatic web gallery creator with a set of 40 templates that create easily edited HTML pages Windows only

Roxio PhotoSuite 8 (www.roxio.com)

This $29.95 program does a very complete job of letting you create and edit sites The templates are oriented toward holidays and family photos and therefore do not look very commercial or business-like, but it is much easier

to redesign various aspects of these templates than in most of the other programs PhotoSuite also lets you send a web site as email, so you can

make interactive attachments

Extensis Portfolio 8 (www.extensis.com)

Available for both Mac and PC, it can now automatically generate web galleries that automatically update as you add new images to a category I haven't tested it yet, but this sounds like a photographer's dream come true

Canto Cumulus (www.canto.com)

Can export thumbnails to HTML, which is not the same as creating a web gallery It creates a web page with thumbnails, but there's no obvious way to edit the page in Dreamweaver A web publishing option for Cumulus, Web Publisher Pro, is available for $1,495 This add-on will publish in a

Dreamweaver-compatible format and offers so many options that there's no room to cover them here If you're interested in an industrial-strength

solution, check out Canto's web site

A Good Way to Start

Even if you want a very sophisticated design for your Web gallery, it's a

good idea to start with a program that automatically creates it This way,

all the basic HTML is written and all the images are collected into the

appropriate folders You can then use a WYSIWYG HTML editor (such

as Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, or Microsoft FrontPage) to

open your site and tweak it from there If you're familiar with Photoshop,

a little practice makes it easy to change titles and captions, background

colors and patterns, and text styles

Before You Start Handing Out CDs

Be sure that the images on the CD are copyrighted and have all the

pertinent metadata imbedded in them and that they are not print-quality

size and resolution I only give out DVDs that are 8x10 resolution JPEGs

at no more than quality level 8 I also have a notice on the label that all

images are copyright the owner and not licensed for publication