Aside from its price tag, it's tough to find a chink in Photoshop's armor. The only real area that Photoshop 5 was vulnerable in, Web graphics support, has been addressed with the integration of the Adobe ImageReady 2.0 client in Photoshop 5.5.
Adobe ImageReady is the perfect complement to Photoshop and Illustrator. The app gives developers a complete set of tools for publishing graphics on the Web. Image compression in real-time, built-in editing tools, quick and easy animation features, and batch-processing capabilities help you develop, optimize, and animate images.
ImageReady 2.0 adds JavaScript rollover effects to a feature-rich initial release. Additional features include support for Photoshop API filters; editable/scalable text, tweening (a cool morphing-like feature that blends aspects of different images, creating interim instances with transitional attributes), automated image slicing capabilities (allows designers to split an image along user-defined guidelines for more precise layout control on the Web), and the ability to create client-side image maps (by assigning URLs to layers in an image).
For additional information on Adobe ImageReady, please see our separate review of the product.
