Slicing and Saving Graphics in Photoshop for Use on the Web - I Like my Graphics Sliced Thin
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Now that you know a little more about the slicing tool, it’s time that we go a little farther in-depth with the slicing of our layout. So, let's go ahead and slice our background. The best way to do it is to zoom in to a really good working size at the top left corner then begin to slice.
After I zoom in, I begin with the slicing the top left corner. Then I continue with a one pixel wide slice of the top “bar” part of the background, and a 1 pixel tall slice of the left “bar”. I make them 1 pixel tall or wide, based on their location, because instead of having an image that’s 158 pixels wide that has a file size that’s about 8k, I get an image that’s 1 pixel wide that is around 20bytes that can be tiled. This is what my view looks like after I’ve made the first three slices.
After I make those three slices, I then slice the following three corners, and I slice a 1 pixel wide sample of the bottom bar and a 1 pixel tall sample of the right bar. That’s all the images needed to remake the background area at any size needed. Now let's slice the content block.
The content block is done in the exact same way the background area was sliced, with one small difference. Look at the following image and see that I completely forgot to slice the dark blue boarder in the inner part of the block. I left it out on purpose. Since the inner part is a rectangular area with no complex image in it, this area can be recreated with code, which loads a lot faster than an image.
Once again I go ahead and get the last three corners, and the other two bars. Then I go to save all my slices with the “save for web” tool that can be found on the file menu of Photoshop.
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