Adobe Captivate: When It Comes to Images, Choose Your Quality

by Kevin Siegel Follow us on Twitter View our profile on LinkedIn

As a Captivate developer, you are constantly striving to offer the nicest-looking published file, at the smallest possible size. One thing you can do to lower the size of your published video is control the quality of your slides. Captivate offers four image quality levels you can specify. You can apply the settings to individual slides, or for all of the project slides. The levels, which are available in the General group of the Properties panel, include Low (8-bit), Optimized, JPEG and High (24-bit).

Adobe Captivate slide image quality drop-down menu.

Low (8 bit): This option will publish your slides with the smallest possible size and should be the one you try first. While your published SWF will be smaller when compared to using the other modes listed here, this setting will lower the quality of the published images so much, you may not like it. According to Adobe, "This option works well for most images and for all the screen recorded content, but can fail if the image contains too many colors or many colors with different transparencies." In other words, you don't want to use this option if a slide contains high-end PNGs or Photoshop documents.

Note: Using the Low (8-bit) option, JPEG images will be published as JPEGs. The compression JPEGs is controlled by the JPEG quality percentage via the SWF size and quality preferences (via File > Publish Settings).

Optimized: All of the images in the project will be published as bitmaps (even the JPEG images). This option will result in nice-looking images, but will increase the size of your published SWF dramatically.

JPEG:
 This option is similar to Optimized, except all of the project images will be published as JPEGs instead of bitmaps.  Since the JPEG format does not support transparencies, some images could end up looking fuzzy.

High (24-bit): Publishes images as 24-bit bitmap images (except JPEGs). This option will result in the hightest quality images, but the largest published SWF.

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Looking to learn Adobe Captivate 5? We offer Beginner and Advanced classes. Both Windows and Macintosh developers can attend these classes.

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