Photoshop is a powerful graphics editing software package. It's become something of an industry standard, thanks to its raft of professional features. Web developers, however, have always found that Photoshop comes up a little short. Version 5.5 introduced a lot of Web-friendly features, and despite a few minor deficiencies, (the main one being lack of support for animated GIFs), Photoshop can now claim to be a complete graphics powerhouse suitable for both online and print applications.
Web developers will find many Web-friendly improvements in version 5.5, but perhaps the greatest is the "Save for Web" option. This opens up a dialog box that contains a pretty complete toolkit for saving images in Web-friendly formats. You can make GIFs transparent and interlaced, convert images to the Web palette, and even optimize images for the Web to reduce their file size (as Web graphics gurus have done for a long time, using programs like WebRazor and Debabelizer). Best of all, you can actually compare different versions of an image side by side, in either a 2-up or 4-up display. This is might handy, as it lets you see how different formatting choices will affect the final output, and make the best choice, without any tedious saving and re-saving.
Learning Photoshop
Photoshop is quite powerful, but quite complex. It can also be quite frustrating if you don't read the manual first. For example, if you don't understand how layers work, you'll be tearing your hair out trying to figure out why you can't do anything! And you'll be cussing the zoom tool until you learn the shortcuts for various zoom levels.
Photoshop sticks fairly close to standard Windows commands, but a few common Windows shortcuts don't work the way you might think. For example, pressing the alt key and a letter will not take you to the menu bar, but will choose a tool from the toolbar. There are lots of shortcuts and different ways to do things, allowing you to work very fast once you learn the program thoroughly.
Layers are one of the most powerful aspects of Photoshop. Elements can exist on separate layers, allowing you to do almost anything to an element without affecting other elements. You can also make layers visible or invisible, which comes in very handy when creating several slightly different images, for example to make an animation.
Another powerful feature is the History, which lets you go back to any point since the last time you opened a file. This means that you are free to try anything you want, knowing that you can always undo it, even if it involves several edit operations.
Let's illustrate how to use some of the features by creating a Web banner from scratch, in our next section.
This article is in three parts:
Web developers will find many Web-friendly improvements in version 5.5, but perhaps the greatest is the "Save for Web" option. This opens up a dialog box that contains a pretty complete toolkit for saving images in Web-friendly formats. You can make GIFs transparent and interlaced, convert images to the Web palette, and even optimize images for the Web to reduce their file size (as Web graphics gurus have done for a long time, using programs like WebRazor and Debabelizer). Best of all, you can actually compare different versions of an image side by side, in either a 2-up or 4-up display. This is might handy, as it lets you see how different formatting choices will affect the final output, and make the best choice, without any tedious saving and re-saving.
