Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the media coverage of the Web Design World Conference in Seattle, WA. I had the pleasure to meet up with and interview Michael Ninness, Senior Product Manager for InDesign at Adobe Systems Inc. Michael always draws a crowd and his presentations are nothing short of amazing!
In his two sessions, Pixel Perfect: Essential Image Enhancement for Web and Flash Designers and Trends in Digital Publishing Michael packed a punch with a variety tips and insights on all manner of graphics-related topics ranging from:
•Importing layered PSD files into Flash CS3
•How to Control Flash?’s optimization settings for embedded bitmaps
•How to load external JPEGS, PNGs and GIFs into a SWF file at runtime
•Instant color cast removal
•How to remove or reduce dreaded digital noise
•Photoshop secrets
•Resolving color conflicts between Photoshop and Flash and much more
Check out the four minute interview on the WOW Technology Minute website with Michael where he provides a few tips for the subscribers of this podcast. Look for podcast additional interviews with a host of other notable speakers including representatives from Yahoo and much more.
Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by WebProtraining.org, offering a complete solution for all your Web professional training needs including WOW certification options. Check it out at
Web Professional Training
Transcript of Michael Ninness
Length – 4:09
BILL CULLIFER: We?’re here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute, here at the Web Design World Seattle Conference where WOW is a media sponsor. I have the pleasure to be interviewing Michael Ninness from Adobe, specifically representing Product Manager for InDesign. You presented twice here today Michael, great sessions, they were jam-packed. Can you give us a summary of those sessions?
MICHAEL NINNESS: Sure.
BILL: And can you also provide us with a walk-away, something that our listeners…? Yeah, that would be great.
MICHAEL NINNESS: Yeah, so we did two sessions today. One of them was called “Pixel Perfect” which was just as many tips as I could cram in an hour on how to get your images looking the best they could with Flash Web design. So lots of practical imaging tips. The second session at the end of the day was “Transit Digital Publishing.” We took a look at what?’s going on in the world of digital magazines and digital publications online, how the Internet is kind of changing traditional print models and how they?’re complementary to each other. At the end of that session I did a technology sneak peek of what a future version of InDesign at Flash might do to make the handoff of working with InDesign and Flash together.
BILL: Going to be announcing Macs maybe, in San Francisco?
MICHAEL: The technology preview means that it may or may not show up in a future product.
BILL: Fair enough.
MICHAEL: This is our chance to kind of give a sneak peek at what we‘re thinking. Today if you wanted to go from InDesign to Flash there?’s really no handoff story other than to export a JPEG out of your print layout. So we?’re trying to imagine now that these two companies are together, could there be a better handoff strategy or workflow between InDesign and Flash?
BILL: Totally. So it?’s all about workflow and all about making it easier for communication between the designer and developer.
MICHAEL: Well it?’s also enabling the traditional print designers [inaudible].
BILL: Fair enough. Yeah, sure.
MICHAEL: They live in a world that seems like A, if not A resolution than they?’ve got to learn animation and action script and interact activities, so this is kind of a bridge to get them to kind of play along with their Flash brothers and sisters.
BILL: Yeah, totally.
MICHAEL: I?’ll give you a couple of tips from the “Pixel Perfect“ session today two that kind of stood out and made people go, “Wow, I wish I?’d known that a long time ago.” First one is there is no such thing as resolution on the Web. It doesn?’t matter if it?’s 1,000 dpi or 72 dpi. What matters is how many pixels across and how many pixels down . So a lot of people were going, “Really? No. I?’ve always heard it was 72 dpi for the Web, right?”
BILL: Interesting.
MICHAEL: It?’s like, no, it makes no difference. It?’s how many pixels across and how many pixels down. The resolution can be anything you want. So resolution only matters when you print.
BILL: Huh, interesting.
MICHAEL: Second tip is that there?’s a way in Photoshop to do two different levels of compression in the same JPEG. So you might have an image where there?’s a portrait of two people in the foreground, let?’s say, and you don‘t want their faces to get all JPEG-y and artifact, but you don?’t really care so much about the background. So to do that you?’d go to the channels panel in Photoshop and you would paint out a little mask of their faces, that‘s the area you want to protect. Then you go to the web dialer box and file, save for web, and next to the quality wheel, there?’s a little tiny button that a lot of people miss. If you click that it takes you to a secret dialing box where you can actually control–
BILL: Ah! Terrific.
MICHAEL: …two different levels of compressions. There?’s a black slider and a white slider. The white slider represents the areas that you painted in that channel before. The black area stands for everything else. You can set two compression values for each area.
BILL: I appreciate that. Two great tips.
MICHAEL: Bonus tips.
BILL: Yeah, bonus tips.
MICHAEL: You have a text layer. You don?’t even have to do the alpha channel, you go into save for the Web and you have your text layers in your document, you click that little secret button there, there?’s a little checkbox that says “automatically create a mask off your text layers.” So why is that important? So you see text against an image, typically when you save images as JPEGs the text looks all mangled. This lets you have your text in nice and crisp against the photographic background.
BILL: Nice! Three excellent, great things. Michael, certainly appreciate it, all the stuff that you do for the organization, all the things that you do for the profession. We certainly appreciate it. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) Michael Ninness at the Web Design World Seattle Conference. And a nice shirt too to boot, Michael.
MICHAEL: Thank you.
BILL: Thank you so much for your time today.
MICHAEL: Bye.