Photoshop for web graphics

Jessie

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Hi All,

As a personal hobby, I've recently started learning how to use Photoshop CS(I already have CS for some time). I'm more interested in learning PS to create great looking web graphics. So I did some search on Amazon for books that specifially target this area. So far all the books I'd seen are either PS Bible type of books or web graphics books with an emphasis on Paint Shop Pro, or PS Element. I'm wondering if anyone on the board happens to know a good CS book that is written particularly for beginners learning web graphics. Your help is really appreciated!
 
i'm afraid i don't know of any books for that sort of thing, but there are loads of tutorials on the web. One thing you will need to get used to using are vectors, so that might be a good place to start looking
 
The thing is, PS is a photo editing tool. While you can create some cool graphics, that's not really what it's geared towards. That's probably why there isn't much info out there. You might want to look at one of the more graphics orientated programs.
 
http://www.spoono.com This is a great website and it has free tutorials. Also, this site has many links to other great sites. I have found that tutorials online are much more helpful then any book that I have seen. In all reality, no book is going to make you or anyone a master at graphic design, practicing will. Doing tutorials will show you how to use the tools in a functional way.
 
After browsing Amazon.com for a few minutes, I stumbled across these books which will be of help I'm sure.

http://tinyurl.com/geegp

http://tinyurl.com/hss66

http://tinyurl.com/k2qcp

markc said:
The thing is, PS is a photo editing tool. While you can create some cool graphics, that's not really what it's geared towards. That's probably why there isn't much info out there. You might want to look at one of the more graphics orientated programs.

I would wager to say that 99% of web designers use photoshop for their designs. It's setup for making web graphics. It will automatically cut up your document into slices, ready made for tables, and then save it with compression for the web, including support for transparent gifs. There are literally millions of combinations of filters, and ways to create every kind of texture you can imagine. I wouldn't use anything else. As much as it may be touted as photo editing program, it is so much more, and when used with Illustrator and InDesign, it's part of a complete package for web and print graphic design.
 
I guess I'm thinking of older versions. I've never actually used a lot of that stuff. I didn't think it did vector graphics yet, or any of the media brushes or the like. I always thought Illustrator was more the graphics program.
 
Web design tends to move in trends. Around 8 or so years ago, when I first got into web design, it was metal and rust. Lots of experimentation with textures, and pipes, and industrial looking stuff. It was all created in photoshop. It's not just newer versions, and it's not always vector. Now a days, you do see more clean lines, and vector type stuff. The layout of this site is a perfect example, although this is probably 99% style sheets.
 
can I create a website in Photoshop CS? if so how?
 
D-50 said:
can I create a website in Photoshop CS? if so how?

That's an extremely broad question, and one that hundreds of books have been written on. I linked to some books in an earlier reply to this thread. Google is also your friend.

You aren't going to create a website in CS. You'll create the layout and the graphics. It still needs to be coded, either by hand with notepad, or some kind of software (there are hundreds).
 
Digital Matt said:
Web design tends to move in trends. Around 8 or so years ago, when I first got into web design, it was metal and rust. Lots of experimentation with textures, and pipes, and industrial looking stuff. It was all created in photoshop. It's not just newer versions, and it's not always vector. Now a days, you do see more clean lines, and vector type stuff. The layout of this site is a perfect example, although this is probably 99% style sheets.
I did overstat the case against Photoshop, but "all" the websites then weren't made with it either. I got into web design around '95. There weren't enough others around to compare notes with many other designers, but the people I knew just used what they were comfortable with. Personally I found photo editors to be limited, and I experimeted with other software, including things like POVray and the like for 3D images. Several years later the market got flooded my web designers, but by that time I had discovered that I was better at coding than graphic design, so I stuck to programming.

Photoshop is a photo editor by design right from the begining. They've added more and more other types of things to it over the years, but it's still a photo editor at heart. It's so powerful, I'm sure many people have no problem doing all their web graphics in it, so I guess my point can be considered moot because of that, but depending on what you want to do, you might find it a lot easier in software that was designed for graphic design right from the begining. The graphic designer we had in my last job used Photoshop for a lot of things, but also had to have Corel Draw to do many of her designs. She did a great job with them, but once we got her Illustrator, she was thrilled!

So yeah, I guess both of our points are valid. Photoshop is certainly capable and many people prove that every day. But there may be software that would work better for them if they were aware of it, depending on what kind of design they do.
 
As has been mentioned before PS is primarily a photo editing package. For web graphics a better package would be Macromedia studio, more specifically Macromedia Fireworks which is designed for web graphics.
 
As a professional web designer I agree with Neo largely, I use a combination of Fireworks, DreamWeaver and Photoshop to construct sites. If there was just one that was most use to learn for a newbie I think I'd recommend getting to grips with fireworks... but make sure you learn about optimisation of both images and layouts first ! If you are serious about learning web design, learn to use Dreamweaver and CSS - you won't find many professional studios / individuals who don't these days.
 

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