Umm, you use Dreamweaver and Fireworks! Sorry, but your whole approach seems somewhat more than just a little clunky, given the nature of the work. By no means is Photoshop suitable as a replacement for learning the intricacies of web design, no matter how much you may loathe having to learn it… And once you do, your issues will resolve themselves – both DW and FW auto-update references to PSDs in CS4.
Mylenium
Right. I understand Fireworks and Dreamweaver. Imagine, if you will, that you were asked to design a website for the largest brand in the world and you were going to be receiving, oh I don’t know, 500K-800K in compensation. The only catch, you must design everything in Photoshop. Pretend, for a minute, that I have designed and programmed thousands of websites using Dreamweaver and Fireworks and I am familiar with their capabilities. Imagine that I already assume Photoshop can not do what, say Illustrator and InDesign do in that, when building a multipage document, you can maintain actual links to the original art files (which is what I’m really looking for here, not talking href links or anything of that sort). So, pretend Photoshop only exists in this world. No need to concern any one self with why only Photoshop exists, just think for a moment if you know of any way to maintain linked art like you can in Illustrator and InDesign where you can place a PSD and, when you update that PSD, it cascades across all files where it is used. Not talking jpegs, href links, etc etc etc. Any way that Photoshop can behave like Illustrator and InDesign and maintain the link without turning it into a SmartObject etc (which is what happens in Photoshop when you use File > Place)
Thanks for the help
no. can’t be done as you describe in photoshop.
An additional note to this less than efficient scenario… pretend you are not programming the actual website, you are asked to hand off a layered PSD file for each and every page, screen, and module within the website. This is a requirement regardless of whether there may be more efficient scenarios using Fireworks combined with Dreamweaver. Additionally, you have no say as to what the developers use to program the site nor how they receive the files.
What I’m trying to avoid here is laying out 200 photoshop files and, when the client says, "Oh sorry, we gave you the old logo" I have to go into ever Photoshop file and replace the logo. I understand that there are better ways to accomplish this by using software other than Photoshop. If I were to build this in Illustrator, for instance, I could maintain a file for each page that, when placing the psd into ai, it would maintain a link to that file. Therefore, when I updated the logo.psd and reopened any of the ai files, the logo would update in those files. Or, in Fireworks, I could maintain a common library of graphics.
My current solution would involve setting up a master PSD file that had a layer comp for each page so that I can cascade changes globally throughout the file and, when it comes time to deliver the required separate PSD for each page, screen and module, I can export layer comps as separate PSDs using the automated script in Photoshop.
Any other suggestions? Please share.
