I have designed a web site using photoshop and am optimizing it for the web using image ready. slicing ....and all that.  When I save it for the web though I am loosing a lot of pic information and my images I have imbeded in the page are coming out grainy.  The conversion from image to web document is turning the images into gifs and I am loosing color information.  I have gone to preferences and played around with the settings but that didn't seam to help.  Does anyone know how I can turn the page I have built into a working web document easily wouthout loosing any quality in my images. 

On a side note I usually build my pages in photoshop, convert in image ready, and tweak in Dreamweaver.  I usually do not have many photos though.  My graphics are fine just the images are loosing quality.  Can anyone help?

You can select to save the graphics as JPGs within Image Ready.

are jpg's better than png's?  There are quite a lot of jpg settings to choose from which have you found to work best?

I normally use high-quality, low-compression for JPGs. The sizes are small enough if saved via ImageReady or via Save For Web in Photoshop.

As for whether JPGs or PNGs are better ... it depends. JPGs are more universally accepted by web browsers, so I normally use JPGs for graphics going on web sites. However, PNGs are nice if you want some transparency -- they're like GIFs that way, but with the color quality of JPGs. The only drawback is that some browsers don't allow you to see the transparency as intended. So I try not to use them for web site graphics. I do, however, use them for Cafepress graphics if transparencies are involved.

use gifs for cartoon images with limited colours, and large areas of single colours. use jpegs for photos and images with gradients or fine detail. your client's browser may try to display any other image types with plugins and helper apps, so skip pngs, tiffs, tga, bmp, pict, bum, favicon, jif, jpeg2000, x-face, kiss cel, trs-80 or any other of several dozen geek filetypes.