Photoshop for web graphics vs fireworks – sizing shapes and images

DH
Posted By
David_Hassen
Oct 21, 2008
Views
276
Replies
8
Status
Closed
Hi all,

I’m a web designer / developer and I’ve always used fireworks to create my graphics for buttons, or backgrounds of web sites.

I’m aware that photoshop is apparantly the tool of choice for most pro web designers, but……..

How the heck can you size things in Photoshop (CS3)???!

Sounds like a daft question, and sounds like an extremley basic task, but I cannot find how / where to do it in photoshop.

Say I need two shapes to be the same width, and I’m creating two images, how do I set the two shapes to be 100px wide for example? I don’t mean the canvas, I mean a shape within a canvas.

Point me in the right direction and call me stupid!

Thanks

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M
Mylenium
Oct 21, 2008
Edit –> Transform should be all you need. Unlike FW, PS works natively on pixels, not containers, so beware – transforms change pixels permanently. To gain a similar functionality, you may wish to convert such layers into smart objects before transforming them.

Mylenium
DH
David_Hassen
Oct 21, 2008
brilliant thanks for that I knew it’d be somewhere……

when I have the transform > scale on the context-sensitive toolbar at the top of the workspace, I can change the W and H by percentage, but I want to type in the number of pixels – I assume this can be changed, but how?

Thanks
M
Mylenium
Oct 21, 2008
PS recognizes unit abbreviations, so when you type in 100 px, it will use 100 px. Short of that simply change the default unit to pixels in the preferences or by right-clicking in the document ruler (you may need to enable them first in your view menu).

Mylenium
DH
David_Hassen
Oct 22, 2008
Thanks Mylenium, that did it. It was just something ‘simple’ that I couldn’t find any info on! Thanks
P
Phosphor
Oct 22, 2008
Also, David…

For maximum flexibility and editing freedom-without-image-degradation, you ought to look into Photoshop’s Custom Shapes Tools for creating vector objects. These can be combined with Pen Tool paths as well, and each object can live on its own, Layer-Stylable layer.
DH
David_Hassen
Oct 22, 2008
thanks Phos, there’s clearly a lot to learn, Photoshop provides a totally different way of working compared to Fireworks. Can anyone recommend any good books for learning Photoshop – for creating graphics rather than editing photos?

Thanks
DM
Don_McCahill
Oct 22, 2008
I don’t know of any books that concentrate purely on editing graphics in Photoshop. The program was designed as a photo editor, after all, and web graphics are just a sideline.

Best overall book I know for learning the basics is the Photoshop Classroom in a Book, available for each version of the program. You can ignore the photo manipulation chapters (though I would recommend them … one day you might want to put a photo on your website.)

🙂
DH
David_Hassen
Oct 22, 2008
Thanks Don. Well I thought that about Photoshop being originally designed to be a photo editor, but it seems so many people use it to do web design nowadays. I think I’ve heard of that series of books, I’ll probably give it a go. Lol I do already use photos on my websites, or integrate them with other graphics, so yes I take your point!

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