In the world of web design, graphics play a major part in the presentation of a webpage. Without them we would all be creating or looking at boring plain text websites. It is thanks to graphical applications that we are able to produce such fresh and appealing websites. There are a number of applications available on the market today that allow for the creation of images and illustrations, such as Paint Shop Pro, PhotoImpact and even MS Paint but none come close to the abilities of Photoshop.

Photoshop is a market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation. Distributed by Adobe systems, it is described as the industry standard for graphics professionals the world over. Photoshop has come a long way since its first version. Created by a person named Thomas Knoll, it started off as a Macintosh (early Apple Mac) program for displaying greyscale images on a monochrome monitor. Thomas’ brother recommended that the program should be developed into an image editing tool, which they named ImagePro. Once in a complete state the program was renamed to Photoshop and distributed in small quantities with Barneyscan scanners.

Whilst demonstrating the software to various companies, Adobe stumbled upon the software and took it on board by purchasing a licence to distribute it. In 1990 Photoshop version 1.0 was released for Macintosh systems exclusively. It was at this point that the world of image design changed forever, over a number of versions Photoshop has been moulded into an image crunching machine that can do just about anything you can imaging with an image.

Photoshop like many of the Adobe programs supports a whole host of file formats, which enables the end user to edit almost any image created by any application. Photoshop also integrates with other Adobe applications, which makes it simple when transporting images from one stage of design to the next. Photoshop offers a number of tools designed especially for web designers, one of these tools is the slice tool. This enables designers to create a website layout as an image and then slice it up into individual images to be used. Photoshop automatically saves all slices out as individual images using one click, meaning that time is saved.

Another good feature in Photoshop is the ability to save out images that are optimised for the web. Photoshop lets us customize how an optimised image will look and also displays a number of optimised versions that have already been customised to get the best file size and quality. Now both these features are included in other image editing software packages, but none give as much customisation for output as can be seen in Photoshop. For the slicing tool in other software, the user usually has to save out each slice separately, which can take a long time if your site design has a lot of images.

These are just two features of Photoshop out of thousands that web developers use on a daily basis, if you are looking at creating a web site for yourself and want a professional edge then Photoshop is the way to go. There are hundreds of tutorials available on the web, so if you are not already using Photoshop what are you waiting for.