Adobe® CS4 Web Workflows: Building Web Sites With Adobe® Creative Suite® 4

Chapter 1. CREATING THE COMP

Adobe Photoshop is rightly well known for uses in digital photography, print preparation, and even, with the introduction of Photoshop Extended, 3D and medical imagery. Although lesser known, Photoshop's Web capabilities are equally robust. Factor in the ubiquity of Photoshop in design houses around the world and its newly introduced Dreamweaver connectivity, and you have a tool ready to create a comp for almost any Web site.

Given its full-featured implementation as a graphics editor, it's no wonder that Photoshop is often overwhelming to those new to the software. This chapter — and the others following it in this part — takes a learn-by-doing approach. Here, you'll build up a sample composition in Photoshop to be converted to a Web page in Dreamweaver. As you move through the design process, you'll encounter core techniques essential to working in Photoshop. The core Photoshop techniques covered in this chapter are:

• Working with layers

• Making a selection

• Extracting images from the background

Later chapters in this part build on the design foundation you put down in Photoshop and extend your work to its ultimate goal: a Dreamweaver Web site.

INITIALIZING THE COMP

While there is no direct interaction between Photoshop and Dreamweaver detailed in this chapter, ...