Choosing Graphics Softwareprogram such as Adobe Photoshop. If you have a digital camera or scanner attached to your computer, it probably came with some graphics software capable of creating web page graphics.
a good tool for web graphics. In that case, you might want to consider downloading the evaluation version of Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop Elements if you're using a Windows computer, or Adobe Photoshop Elements if you're using a Macintosh. For Windows users, another new and very interesting image program is Google Picasa, which is available free at http://picasa.google.com/. Picasa is Google's entry into the image-editing market, and it offers some unusual features not found in other image editors. However, Picasa is better suited toward organizing and editing digital photographs, as opposed to creating web graphics from scratch. Even so, it's a powerful (and free) tool that is worth checking out. Try It Yourself An excellent and inexpensive program that provides everything you're likely to need for web images is Paint Shop Pro from Corel. If you are using a Windows computer, you can download a fully functional evaluation copy of Paint Shop Pro before reading the rest of this lesson. (Macintosh users should download Adobe Photoshop Elements from http://www.adobe.com/ instead, because Paint Shop Pro is currently available for Windows only. There is also a version of Photoshop Elements for Windows if you're partial to Adobe products.) Here's how to get Paint Shop Pro:
Almost all the graphics you see in this book were created with Paint Shop Pro, and this chapter uses Paint Shop Pro to illustrate several key web graphics techniques you'll need to know. Of course, there are so many ways to produce images with Paint Shop Pro that I can't even begin to explain them all. Fortunately, the latest version of Paint Shop Pro includes a Learning Center that guides you through common image-editing tasksresizing, auto-correcting brightness and color, and so on. |
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