Mastering Photoshop for Web Design Vol. 2 contains eleven articles that cover useful and partly unknown techniques and tricks from experts such as retouching, cloning, compositing, obscure Photoshop timesavers and designing for iPhone. The articles have been published on Smashing Magazine, a leading online magazine for professional Web designers and developers, in 2010 and 2011 and have been carefully edited and prepared for this e-book. As the technology grows, all of us seek for time-saving tips and guidelines to make our work much more effective as well as productive. This e-Book is the new Photoshop e-book edition in our Smashing eBook series and we hope that you will find these tips and techniques useful and valuable to gain a more efficient workflow.

The book contains eleven chapters:

Mastering Photoshop: Noise, Textures, Gradients and Rounded Rectangles

Often, it’s the little details that turn a good layout into a great design; details such as subtle textures, shading and smooth shapes. Photoshop contains a vast array of tools for embellishing a design, but choosing the right one isn’t always easy. Being the obsessive-compulsives that we are, we’ve conducted a huge range of experiments to determine the benefits and disadvantages of each technique. Here, then, is an obsessive- compulsive’s guide to some frequently used tools and techniques for Web and UI design in Photoshop.

Useful Photoshop Tips And Tricks for Photo Retouching

When it comes to designing in Photoshop, there is a myriad of ways one could use to achieve a certain result, especially when it comes to photo retouching. Designers use technique they are most confident as well as comfortable with, which is great because it’s always useful to peek into the workflow of our colleagues and learn new design approaches. I’ll be covering some of the useful techniques and tricks which I’ve learned from my experience.

Photo Retouching Tips and Tricks in Photoshop

We have had articles on various tools in Adobe Photoshop but this one is focused more on the techniques rather than the tools provided.

The Ultimate Guide to Cloning in Photoshop

Photoshop’s wide array of cloning tools is the cause of many of the absolute best and worst works created with the application. In a skilled and experienced hand, these tools lead to phenomenal results. In the hands of a careless artist, Photoshop cloning can be disastrous to the credibility of the result. This article introduces the several cloning tools available in Photoshop and goes over the proper usage and best practices of each.

Designing for iPhone 4 Retina Display: Techniques and Workflow

For developers only using Apple’s user interface elements, most of the work is already done for you. For those with highly custom, image-based interfaces, a fair amount of work will be required in scaling up elements to take full advantage of the iPhone 4 Retina display. Scaling user interfaces for higher detail displays — or increasing size on the same display — isn’t a new problem. Interfaces that can scale are said to have resolution independence.

Mastering Photoshop: Pixel Perfection when Rotating, Pasting and Nudging

When creating Web and app interfaces, most designers slave over every single pixel, making sure it’s got exactly the right color, texture and position. If you’re not careful, though, some common functions like moving, rotating and pasting can undo your hard work, resulting in a blurry mess. But with some small changes to your workflow, you should be able to maintain the highest-quality artwork from the start to the end of the project.

Setting up Photoshop for Web and iPhone Development

Most people who have designed websites or apps in Photoshop will, at one point or another, have had issues trying to match colors in images to colors generated by HTML, CSS or code. This article aims to solve those problems once and for all.

Compositing in Adobe Photoshop: Time- Saving Tips