Adobe ImageReady


Adobe ImageReady is a discontinued bitmap graphics editor that was shipped with Adobe Photoshop for six years. It was available for Windows, Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X from 1998 to 2007. ImageReady was designed for web development and closely interacted with Photoshop.

Function

ImageReady was designed for web development rather than effects-intensive photo manipulation. To that end, ImageReady has specialized features such as animated GIF creation, image compression optimization, image slicing, adding rollover effects, and HTML generation.
Photoshop versions with which ImageReady was released have an "Edit in ImageReady" button that enables editing of image directly in ImageReady. ImageReady, in turn, has an "Edit in Photoshop" button.
ImageReady has strong resemblances to Photoshop; it can even use the same set of Photoshop filters. One set of tools that does not resemble the Photoshop tools, however, is the Image Map set of tools, indicated by a shape or arrow with a hand that varied depending upon the version. This toolbox has several features not found in Photoshop, including:
Adobe ImageReady 1.0 was released in July 1998 as a standalone application. ImageReady was packaged with Photoshop versions 2.0 through 9.0. Starting with Photoshop 7, Adobe changed the version numbers of ImageReady to 7.0.
VersionRelease dateBundled with
v1July 1998
v2July 1999Photoshop 5.5
v3October 2000Photoshop 6.0
v7February 2002Photoshop 7.0
v8 October 2003Photoshop CS
v9 May 2005Photoshop CS2

With the release of the Creative Suite 3, ImageReady was discontinued. According to Adobe, ImageReady's features were merged into Photoshop only by popular demand. At the same time, Adobe published Fireworks, which was originally ImageReady's competitor before Adobe's acquisition of its developer, Macromedia.