Decide how you’ll handle complex images.

High-resolution images give the best results in commercially printed documents, but images on the Web need to be optimized for fast on-screen display. You can convert high-resolution images to an optimized Web format (GIF or JPEG) in InDesign when you package your document, or when you add the images to a Web page in GoLive later. Before packaging, assess images in your document to decide which approach to take. InDesign supports a variety of complex image formats, such as CMYK images with spot-color channels, that are unsuitable for the Web. If your document contains images with spot or alpha channels, it’s best to optimize them in InDesign, since GoLive may not be able to open these image formats.

For our Web site, we told InDesign to package each image in all three formats (original, optimized, and optimized formatted) for maximum flexibility. Some images have formatting from InDesign that we want to preserve. To preserve the rounded corners on the car image, for example, we decided to use the optimized formatted version of the graphic on the Web site. Other images, such as the image of Rinaldo De Fiore, need to be modified to fit the Web site layout, so we wanted the original image instead.