Photoshop Quick Tips for New Website Designers

As a new website designer you may be having some trouble getting to grips with Photoshop. Do not let this put you off, Photoshop is on of the most useful tools in the design process of a website. Photoshop with fireworks and Dreamwaver can be considered the complete pack for a website designer starting out in the website design business.

This first tip is very simple. Have you ever downloaded a.gif file from the internet and then gone to try to edit the image, only to find out that it is uneditable. The padlock icon in the layer panel just wont turn off. No problem. Just go to the menu option at the left top and find image tab and you will see a sub menu in the sub menu click mode another menu will appear. In this menu the index color option will be ticked, this is what is stopping the image being edited. So just click RGB or CMYK and now the image will be editable. Just go to the layer panel and now the padlock icon will now be un-checkable and the image will be editable.

The next tip is really just a starting point for further understanding of Photoshop. Photoshop is not just an image processing application for the screen but also for printing, therefore it has many options for the pre-press process, these can cause conflict for the screen. The most common problem is “color space”. This can cause a color hex code to look different in separate images even though the real hex,rgb or cmyk code are the same, this is due to the fact that each image file will be in a different color space. So the first and most important thing to do is when creating a new image file see what color space you are using. So when you open a new file make sure that you click the advance option from within the panel and see what color space it will be in. In short if you are creating image solely for the screen, and not for printing, then you want to be using “RGB sRGB”. As l.ong as all the other file you create are also in the same color space you will not have any color conflicts. If using other people file or image from other source e.g the net you should check that the image is in the right color space.

To do this go to the edit menu then the convert to profile and check the source profile. If this is not the color space you want i.e. sRGB then click on the destination space drop down tab and choose sRGB, and there you go no color space conflicts.

This article was written by Dave from Solid Air Web.