Selection & Masks / Slice Tool
Subtitles of the Movie
In this tutorial, I want to touch on briefly the slice tool and the slice selection tool. You can generate rectangular selections called slices designed for splitting up a graphic image into different pieces for a table and for presentation in the World Wide Web. I've created this fake website type of a design called flowerpower.com and you can see that I've actually created a few slices here. I'm going to get rid of these slices to show you how you can do that yourself. So, I'm going to go to clear slices. And in order to generate a slice, you can use the slice tool, and that's this exacto knife looking tool. So you create slices for at least a couple of reasons. One is to segregate different areas, so that you might be compressed differently in one image. For instance my text, I might want to save out as a GIF image. Where my photographic type of imagery I might want to save compressed out as a JPEG type of image. Because these different compression methods work better on different types of imagery. GIF image compression works well on solid colored graphics. And JPEG works better on photographic type of continuous tone images. Another reason why you might want to use a slice is to also assign different actions and URLs to a particular slice. So with that in mind, I'm going to choose my slice tool and just drag diagonally over this one area here to create my first slice. Now I can continue adding slices simply by dragging diagonally over the areas that I want to become a slice. In this case, I want each of these words to be a slice section because I am going to, at some point, convert these into buttons. The slice tool has a companion tool as part of the hidden tool. Press and hold on the slice tool and we could choose the slice select tool. And in this way when we choose the slice select tool, we can promote or demote slices. And another nice feature is we can also press this button show auto-slices, and Photoshop will show me other slices that were created. Because of course if I am dividing or selecting a rectangular selection, Photoshop has to create a selection that encompasses everything that was not in my slice. And these are called auto-slices. While I'm using my slice selection tool, which looks like the exacto knife with a little arrow next to it, I can do a couple of things. For instance, I could choose to divide a slice first by selecting the slice - all I need to do is click right on that particular one, and you can see the highlighted color difference. My selected slice in this case is this orange color, and all the other slices are blue, unless they are in auto-slice in which case they have a blue dashed line. So in this point I could choose divide slice if I wish by clicking on that, and it brings up a dialogue box giving me options to divide my slice in these multiple ways. Or another option I have is to choose the slice options button, and in this case I could choose what type of slice it is, an image or no image. And I could also choose a particular URL right here that I want my slice to go to, and a target and message text and an alternate tag as well. The real value for generating slices of course here, is being able to choose file menu>save for web feature. And when you choose save for web, it brings up the save for web dialogue box. And in this dialogue box, it gives us many different functions, which I'm going to talk in more detail in its own tutorial, on how we can choose these options for saving for web. One option that has to do with slices is we can select an individual slice and change its compression setting. For instance, for my text here, I'm going to select contact by clicking on it and hold down the shift key, and select all of these slice sections. These I don't want to be saved as JPEG; instead I might choose a GIF setting, which will make them look better so we don't see JPEG compression artefacts, and they become very small in terms of file size. But if I choose this slice section, I might want this to be saved as JPEG, since it is a photographic type of image in nature. So slices are very valuable and helpful, particularly when you choose the save for web feature. And in this interface, it allows you to really customize how a particular slice is saved and compressed. You can learn a lot more about how to work with slices and saving for the World Wide Web on the VTC tutorial dedicated solely to ImageReady by Adobe.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop 7 |
| Author: | Andrew J. Hathaway |
| SKU: | 33329 |
| ISBN: | 1889347272 |
| Release Date: | 2002-09-05 |
| Duration: | 11 hrs / 152 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | For Online University members only |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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