Creating Web Graphics with Adobe PhotoShop

Adobe® Photoshop® software helps to improve the workflow path from imagination to imagery. Ideal for photographers, graphic designers, and web designers, software delivers features such as automatic layer alignment and blending that enable advanced compositing. Although we shall cover some other graphics packages, such as FireWorks, in other articles, when creating images for the web, there are few tools that compare with PhotoShop and its diverse range of web design-specific tools. Web designers can create or modify images with a wide assortment of professional, fully customizable paint settings, artistic brushes, and drawing tools. When this is combined with an intuitive workspace and the ability to import and export a wide range of file formats, including PSD, BMP, Cineon, JPEG, JPEG2000, OpenEXR, PNG, Targa, and TIFF, PhotoShop is one tool that today’s web graphic designers should not be without. The colour palette, for example, can be optimised specifically for web-safe colours. Web designers can also undo and redo any set of editing steps in an open image with the History palette, and automatically track all editing steps within your files with the Edit History log. Export steps to a text file or save them as part of image metadata for easier documentation of your work, file audits, and more. This makes managing specific icon palettes much, much easier in PhotoShop. Being able to create an image across multiple layers and then splice that image into specific segments ready for use with Cascading Style Sheets makes it easier for web developers to become web designers. Cutting a base image into segments and using CSS can create superbly styled and visually impressive websites very easily. Combined with DreamWeaver and the new integration tools available between the two software packages, both web design and web development just became even more seamless. If you create custom icons and web graphics – as opposed to web banners et al – you will usually have a common theme across your icons. For example, orientation, palette colour or sizes. With PhotoShop, you can automate common production tasks in a variety of ways. Set up event-based scripts, record a series of steps as an Action for efficient batch processing, and design repetitive graphics faster with Variables. Being long established as the software of choice for web designers, PhotoShop has a massive on-line following. Forums and support sites are in abundance, with over 113 million web pages available when searching for PhotoShop information! Whether you’re creating fun web graphics with comic styling and bright colours, realistic images for printed portfolios or vector graphics for scaling, PhotoShop is the perfect software. You can check out some of the graphics that can be created with Adobe PhotoShop for web design at the DataMouse site. Contact DataMouse.biz for all your web design, database design or graphic design needs.