Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Editing Graphics

Nothing’s ever perfect, especially when you’re building a website. Corrections are par for the course—not just to a web page, but to the pictures on it as well. Perhaps a picture is a tad too dark, or you’d like to crop out the rowdy coworker being escorted out by security from your company’s holiday party.

In the hands of less capable software, you’d face a tedious set of steps each time you wanted to edit a graphic. You’d have to open Photoshop, Fireworks, or whatever graphics program you prefer; choose File→Open; navigate to your website folder; find the graphic that needs touching up (if you can even remember its name); and then open it to make your changes.

Dreamweaver includes tools that handle many basic graphics-editing tasks. For more complex work, like changing the text on a button from “Now Firing” to “Now Hiring,” you do need to switch to a different program. But even here, Dreamweaver is considerate of your time; it lets you access your favorite graphics program with just a couple of clicks.

Dreamweaver’s Built-In Editing Tools

Dreamweaver includes four tools that crop, resize, sharpen, and adjust the brightness and contrast of an image (see Figure 5-16). Suppose your boss emails you his portrait with instructions to put it on his “Meet the boss” page. Unfortunately, the picture’s too big and too dark. Rather than launch a separate image-editing program, you can simply add the photo to the page, and then make the corrections within Dreamweaver.

Figure 5-16. The ...