Image slicing

Large, complex graphics for web pages can produce large files, which take a long time to download over the Internet.

However, often these large graphics contain areas of flat color or little detail. To reduce the amount of data to download you can 'slice' the image into sections, which can be download separately.

The advantage is that areas of flat color/little detail can be saved at a lower quality (eg. as a 2-color GIF) than complex areas, which can be saved at a higher resolution. The 2-color GIF file takes less time to download, but it means you can still have high detail areas within your image.

Xara Xtreme not only slices and saves the images for you, it also writes all the necessary HTML too, so you can just copy it into your web page.