Adobe Photoshop is fast becoming a household name. What used to be a name familiar only to professional photographers, designers, graphic artists, advertisers, illustrators and web developers have branched out from that select niche into the whole world. Nowadays, more and more people are using and becoming familiar with the program—from students, to amateur digital artists, even people who are not really into photo-editing or photo-manipulation, only wanting to try the product out casually. It’s been used as a reference, in some cases incorporated into jokes, and mentioned in some advertisements that it can be safely said that Photoshop is a cultural icon of modern times.

An abrupt expansion of users means more updates and upgrades in the race to fashion Photoshop to perfection. Before, only Adobe was working on making Photoshop the best photo editing program; presently, however, new tools and options have enabled the end-users themselves to create filters, plug-ins, brushes, actions, almost any type of resource material for other Photoshop users. Photoshop customers are sustaining themselves and others, and this, in turn, have contributed to the rapid growth and development of the market, the product, the users as well as the knowledge, techniques and avenues of opportunities associated with the program.

Now on its CS4 version, Photoshop has come a very long way. Even though its core functions remain essentially the same, how, when, where, and for what people use them have rapidly evolved from solely being used to creating print ads and digital graphics, into a wide range of capability to create or edit vexels (which looks a lot like a vector), movies (with extended versions), flash and animation (with the PSD2FLA plug-in, etc.), book illustrations, magazine layouts (hand-in-hand with InDesign), website layouts (with SiteGrinder, and other programs).

With the above-mentioned added capabilities, that means that Photoshop has been tuned up to cater to purposes other than photo-manipulation. Now it can be a powerful web designing & web development tool, an animation program, and an even better canvas for them digital painters. People rely on Photoshop to make the web portals project the right image, thereby affection their own online business stores.

That is one of the greatest breakthroughs of Photoshop in the mainstream aspect—it being a helpful and at times indispensable tool to the online entrepreneur in the virtual Internet. With the current global crisis ravaging the entire world, more and more people are turning to self-employment as a means of keeping their respective boats afloat. One of the popular options is to start an online business store. With the Internet having a wide reach, and space, bandwidth and .com names affordable to most people, it’s easy to see why a lot of people are taking advantage of the current situation.

Now we can say that Photoshop is the Multimedia Artist’s best friend. It’s not just for 2D images, but for 3D, and it can even create animations. The only thing lacking, perhaps, is the ability to incorporate sound or music. Still, it is a powerful tool, even without that feature. With Photoshop as your tool, your imagination, literally, is the limit.

Gone are the days when websites were just a clump of text sprinkled with minimal, if any at all, formatting and images. A website was considered cutting-edge if it had a background image, moving graphics, and other elements of a website which, in today’s times, have become a necessity for increased publicity and page views. If today’s modern-day surfers were to see what the websites of several large companies like Lego or Pepsi were back in ’96, without Flash or JavaScript to prettify their websites, there’s a good chance that they would’ve just capped it off as some fake website made by a 9-year-old just learning how to make a one from geocities, whose free time was limited to only 30 minutes a day, right before bedtime.

Times have definitely changed. Internet speed has greatly improved, before it would take a page about 20 minutes just to load, whereas today that same page would just take about a good 5 seconds to do so. The same can be said for web content: website developers now have lots of choices on what and what not to put on their website. Because of that, there has been an increase in web-surfers’ demand for added pizzazz, sparkle, or bling on websites; plain text and images just won’t keep them happy anymore. So what do web designers do to cope with that demand? Of course; they feed it!

CSS, Flash, JavaScript, and HTML are some of the best-known and most-used web-building languages used for decorating websites. Once learned, they can help you in making your site a more attractive corner of the internet. Of course, to be able to utilize these languages, you need tools in which to input your commands. One of the simplest and easiest tools to use is the Notepad application, which allows you to code basic CSS and HTML along with other kinds of language. MS FrontPage, found on computers under Microsoft operating systems, may also be used to achieve certain things in HTML/XHTML/CSS that can’t be done on Notepad. There are also more complex applications which may require purchase, but are well worth it considering the things that you will be able to do with them. A good example of this is Adobe Photoshop. You need to pay for the serial code in order to use the application for an indefinite period of time, but with enough knowledge of how this program works, you can use it to create digital graphics that can be used for your website. Other programs that fall into this category are Adobe Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, and many more.

But what about for those who want to make websites, but don’t know any web-building language? The best thing to do would be to get somebody else to design your website for you, or to learn the language before making your site. If you lack resources and/or time to do so, there are also several programs that can aid you in your dilemma. Add-ons for other programs, such as Sitegrinder Photoshop, help the user by allowing him/her to do things on Photoshop that s/he would not be able to do if there was no plug-in. SiteGrinder makes use of your knowledge on Photoshop to create web pages without coding anything.

PSD2FLA, another plug-in, allows you to save your Photoshop projects in .fla file – making them openable in and editable in flash, and thus, saving you of the hassle of “cropping, export, import, repositioning, renaming, and teeth grinding for every single graphic”, as from the site proper.

Be it CSS or Flash, web designing has reached a new level. New methods are employed, new techniques are used. Are you ready to design for today’s websites, set at Web 2.0?