Web Sites Do-It-Yourself for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. Editing and Creating Web Graphics

• Getting to know Photoshop Elements

• Cropping images

• Resizing images

• Optimizing photos as JPEGs

• Optimizing graphics in GIF format

• Combining photos and text in a new image

• Editing images with multiple layers

In this chapter, you discover some of the extraordinary things you can do with a program like Photoshop Elements. You find out how to create images (like banners and buttons) for Web pages and then resize, crop, and edit those images.

Perhaps most important in this book about creating Web sites, you find step-by-step instructions for creating and optimizing graphics that download quickly over the Web.

You can use a number of competing image-editing programs to complete the tasks in this book. I recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements because it's based on the industry standard in image editing, Adobe Photoshop, but is a lot easier to use and a lot less expensive. In this book, I use Elements 8, but if you use any of the last few versions of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you should have no trouble following along with the features covered in the step-by-step tasks.

Introducing Photoshop Elements

Although Photoshop Elements is a stripped-down version of its big-sister program, Adobe Photoshop, it's still a powerful tool. The workspace, shown in Figure 5.1, is clean and simple yet features many tools and panels — and it has loads of options for editing ...