general question

[Ninjakreborn]

I had a few general questions
If I was doing website layout plans in photoshop, how big should my screen be, for instance, how many pixels wide and tall, or atleast width should I formulate to plan for my website.
As far as layout is concerned
this could help me get started quite a bit.

[zq29]

I normally start out with a canvas 770px wide, so I can put together a design that looks nice on an 800x600 screenm then in the coding stages adapt the design to either stay fixed width, or scale to the screen size.

[Ninjakreborn]

[quote]stay fixed width, or scale to the screen size.[/quote]
What do you mean exactly, I know fluid, 100% fluid is pretty hard to do, I know it has to do with the website formatting to whatever the browser size is, so a bar at the bottom never appears, a scrollbar, it is setup so a scrollbar at hte bottom never needs to appear.  So what do you mean, what are the differences between those 2, I am still a beginner at photoshop, and layout, I realized that now, and I am studying starting with doing photoshop layouts, first cuts of the site, but I need to learn how, so I can do the coding, as well.  Any side advice would be helpful as well.,

[Ninjakreborn]

Actually this is what I was wondering, what should i use for
height, width, resolution, in pixels of a photoshop work area.  I need something I can use as a beginner, eventually when I learn how to do what I am wanting to do, i can start playing with it more, and learning more, and even trying out new things, I want to learn 4 essential abilities right now, doing layouts in photoshop, buttons, logos, banners, and "light" photo manipulation for now, until I have time to take on larger tasks, and learning higher, I still need to start studying ajax, and flash, so I want to get photoshop down first, atleast the software portion, and start learning what I can about other stuff.

[zq29]

Unless you're thinking of doing a fixed height design, it doesn't really matter how high your canvas is to begin with. With resolution, I believe the standard is 72dpi for web graphics.

[Ninjakreborn]

Ok this will help, thanks

[Koobi]

yeah i don't think there's any point going beyond 72dpi because most monitors display at 72dpi (and very few display at 96dpi, right?)

you would use 150/300dpi if you were to print banners...but you would have to ask your printer what resolution they want. also find out what colourspace they want...there are many colourspaces, on the web, it's usually RGB (Red Green Blue) but for print, depending on the printer, you can use either RGB or CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK/Key)

i haven't touched Photoshop in almost 2 years...but when i did use Photoshop, i used to work on a lot of manips.
for manips, first make sure you have a very high resolution image, use the clone tool, texture tool and layer blending modes appropriately. you will also find the layer masks and the quick masks very useful. the Filter > Extract Tool is useful too (i assume it's still in the Filter menu).
if you want to extract an image with the Extract Tool, duplicate the layer in question, use curves (ctrl+M i believe) to create an S shaped curve to increase contrast, then extract from that layer and once you've commited the extraction, ctrl+click on that layer to create a selection of the unextracted pixels and make a copy off the original layer.

image manipulation takes a lot of practice.

but for things like layouts, buttons, logos and banners, you should be able to pick it up quite fast.
also, keep in mind that it's better to use vectors where possible for print because print demands better quality and vectors are very sharp so it's useful for logos.

and don't believe anyone that tells you Photoshop does vectors, it does't. it's all raster images even though it seems like a vector. I recommend something like Illustrator or CorelDraw or even Inkscape for vector graphics.

[AndyB]

72dpi is what PC users get. Mac users get much, much more. I usually do all my web graphics at 100 dpi.