These are tricks are in PhotoShop. My apologies to those who have other graphics programs. If you know of any tips/tricks that would be helpful, send us an email.

Smoothed Corners Have you ever wanted to make those neat squares with the smooth corners? You can make them in about ten different ways, but here is a simple way in PhotoShop. Start by selecting an area to decide how large you want your square to be.

Then you will need to choose Modify=Smooth. Then select how much you want to smooth. This image was 10 pixels. After you have acheived the correct shape, fill with the color of your choice!

Shrink those GIFS in Photoshop! If you want to get the smallest file size for the gifs you plan to use on-line, make sure to do these steps!

1. Make sure to switch to Indexed color
2. Choose "ADAPTIVE" from the pull down menu for Photoshop 4 and above.
3. Check Preview and make sure you can see your image at all times.
4. Try to keep the number as low as possible. This will greatly reduce your file size!

A couple tips from one of our subscribers, Bret Taylor:

1. If you can reduce the number of color changes per horizontal row of pixles you can dramatically reduce the file size. Gif's compress by number of colors per line. (use horizontal stripes rather than verticle, for example)

2. If you use Debabilizer to save your GIFs, you can make them so small, that the process you described where you reduce the number of colors in your image's palette, is almost insignificant in comparison. Photoshop makes large Gif files.
-Gina Menzes, Graphic Designer