Any tips for optimizing photos for Flash?

programming flash
1

I’m curious if anyone has any great tips for preparing photos to be used in a Flash website.

I’m very familiar with Photoshop and I’ve designed many non-Flash sites so I know the general approach for preparing photos for the web. I’ve done a few Flash sites which are heavily image based… no images galleries but just large photos used in the layouts.

In the interest of keeping the file size down to a minimum, I’m bringing the quality of my jpegs down to 45 or even 30 in Photoshop (this usually makes them around 40K ± 10K each). Needless to say, they lack the sharp quality of a good image when brought down to this size.

Lately, I’ve seen some really great Flash sites that have very large images in their layout The photos are very clear and the site moves smoothly/quickly.

So, I guess my question is two-fold:

  1. What can I do to maximize the quality of the photos without compromising the speed of the site?

  2. As a general rule, what is the range of quality for photos brought from Photoshop into Flash? (jpeg, psd, gif?)

thanks for any insight!