Skyrocket.be

Stock imagery is something almost all of us webdesigners come across at some point. And if you haven’t you are either a very good photographer or a poor designer. More recently i’ve discovered the wonderworld of JPEG2000.

JPEG2000 is the an image compression standard introduced in somewhere in august 2000. It’s not exactly new anymore but still little people use it and that has several reasons. Support is one of them. There are very little programs that support JPEG2000 out of the box. Even Photoshop CS and CS2 both need a plugin (which is delivered along with the package on the CD) to enable support for JPEG2000. The support is growing but only in the topline of image editing products. In the lower segments real use of JPEG2000 still has to be intoduced. And as far as i know there are no browsers that support it.

There are several advantages of using JPEG2000 over JPEG but the main reason i use it more and more is the fact it supports alpha transparency. It speeds up my design process (and every bits help, ask your clients), and stock sites that have JPEG2000 images in their gallery like Absolut Vision are a blessing for any designer. Absolutevision offers a big gallery of photo-objects and people with alpha transparancy or clipping paths included. Their imagery allows me to skip the tedious task of extracting a character or object from it’s background, and the quality of the photo’s they offer is great too.

They offer subscriptions for $39 a month (300 downloads) or $79 a year (3600 downloads). I’ve got me a year subscription and i use it alongside my istockphoto subscription but you can also register for free at absolutevision and just download their weekly free image. I’d say try it out and let me know if you have an other good or bad experiences with JPEG2000 or know of any other stock galleries with JPEG2000 images.