5 Reasons why you need Photoshop go in hand with your Blog

Photoshop is not a new tool for many webmasters as this software plays an important role in designing one's template or website. There are even many service providers who will convert your Photoshop file (PSD design) to HTML or XML which is required for a blog or a website. As a newbie blogger or an experienced blogger you need to have this software go in hand along with your blog. I don't say that people who use this tool will taste success, even people who never used this software are still ruling blogosphere. MS Paint too does most of the tasks but if you need a professional and unique way of delivering images and professional look for your blog then you need to have this masterpiece of adobe. You could quickly go through the following points on how you can benefit using this software.

1. Preparing logo's and sprite: 

As a saying goes first impression is the best impression so is the role of the design of your blog template. First thing a visitor sees as soon as he lands on a page is the title of your page. If you are not using a logo then chances are there that the visitor bounces from the page he landed thinking a low quality site. Are you serious about blogging then you might be well interested in making your blog go branded. So before you step into making your blog a brand, the very first thing you need to have is a proper Logo. A well designed Logo with some variety or unique design will surely catch the interest of your visitor. You can create a descent logo with Photoshop with changing fonts, size and the texture.

Next, are you into social networking then you need to have a Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, linked-in, Pinterest etc icons for your blog. You don't need to keep on embedding these logos one after the other but you can simply have them all in a single image which is called as a sprite. So in simple Sprite is nothing but a single big image containing all smaller images required for a page. Where ever you need a logo of your blog or a Facebook icon you can actually get it from the single sprite by coding the required CSS code. If you want Facebook or Twitter icon to appear in the sidebar, footer and underneath the post you need not upload a single image and give the link 3 times but can directly link the sprite image. So if you are having 5 icons uploaded you will have 5 links if you have all of them in a single image then you will have only a single link. So with Photoshop you can create your own sprite having all the required icons of your site. Below is an example how a sprite looks.

2. Preparing an image for your new blog post: 

Do you want the words in your post title to appear in the image of your post or you have searched in Google to get the appropriate image but haven't got any or do you want to create a new and unique image for your newly written blog post, then Photoshop comes into your aid. If you have a picture in your digital camera which needs some words to be written or want your logo to be placed on the image then use Photoshop. You can also alter some images which doesn't have any copyrights over the net and modify it as per your requirements until your image doesn't criticize or hurt some one or violate copyrights. The first picture I used for this post is actually created by me in Photoshop. If you learn some cool designing tricks you too can design even more better and professional images than I designed for this post.

3. To pick exact CSS colors: 

In order to design your blog with some cool background colours with CSS you need the hex code. You got an image which has a favorite colour which you want to have it in your blogs design. Then searching for the required shade in the image over Google will be a hilarious task. Simple way to find the hex code of the colour is open the image with Photoshop and choose the colour picker tool and click on the image you will get the exact hex code, copy the code and use it in your CSS stylesheet. See the image below you can simply learn how to choose the colour.

4. To re-size an image:

You got a image which has to fit into a particular dimension then you can do it by just few clicks in Photoshop. You can re-size the image into required height and width provided you won't scale it into too large or too small picture. You need to go to File>New and create a canvas of your desired height and width and later drag the image into the box and click Ctrl + T and hold Shift and scale accordingly. The image of your desired dimensions can be easily achieved. The photo you use for your author page can be re-sized into an exact size what you wanted to have.

5. To change the format of image or give special effects:

You can change the format of the image from JPEG to PNG or GIF and so. Open the image and click save as and while saving change it into the required format you want. Isn't this so simple you can change your image to gray scale or give some noise or distortion. Now that these are few basics but Photoshop has got ocean of tricks which can be learnt on practice.

Actually I am not a professional user nor a regular user, I am still unaware of many Photoshop tricks. Whatever I learnt till now are just by trial and error methods. I search for various tricks on the net and apply it and learn. Are you interested to learn then you too can learn it by some interest. This software is little bit costlier to buy but if you are a professional blogger then you can buy its latest version and try. If you are still in learning stages then better use MS Paint as an image editing tool.