An often missing element of creating top quality images in Photoshop is sharpening. This is even more important when you are resizing very large images down to much smaller versions, in particular in the range of less than 25% original size. You will certainly find yourself in this situation if you are resizing images for the Internet from high resolution print quality images.
When you are working with lots of layers, it makes sense to use layer groups so you don’t end up with just a huge list of unorganised layers in the palette. However, as you are building more complex files in Photoshop, the problem you can get is too many layer groups!! I’ve experienced this with very complex compositions and in-particular when I’m designing website visuals.
I have read a-lot about this around the Internet, and there is a-lot of debate about how to stop this shift in colours when you use the ’save for web’ function. I will explain what I do in as easy to understand manner as possible! This is something that is really annoying for Photoshop users, especially those that have little or no understanding of colour profiles and ’soft proofing’.
Here is the scenario – you have an image that you have colour corrected to your hearts content. You the go to ’save for web’ and disaster strikes – the contrast can go a bit wishywashy, saturation is lost and all-in-all your perfect image doesn’t look so perfect anymore! Don’t panic, just follow my simple step to perfect web colour!
I often see Photoshop files where the background is filled with a flat colour. The simple way to do this is to simply select all and fill with the desired colour – but what if you change your canvas size… back to step one because your left with a rectangle filled with one colour surrounded by your background colour! There is a simpler, more flexible way of-course!
This is a tip I had almost forgotten about, until I resized down a simple GIF image, and remembered why it had come out such bad quality!