A Custom Made Graphic Basic

I use a fair number of custom made graphics across all of my blogs.  These range from my title header to sub-titles to backgrounds and anywhere else that I want a specific graphic to meet the current needs including some posts.  For example I made a graphic to use for Blog Your Blessings Sunday and another one for Kitchen Quick Tips and yet another for Frugal Kitchens 101.  These images serve to form a bit of a trademark within the blog as they always start those particular posts.  I also make custom made animations that usually are included for special occasions like Christmas.  I work exclusively in Photoshop® for all of my photo editing and custom made graphics.  It is rather funny because when I started blogging even though I had Photoshop® for ages the most I had used it for was to resize a photo.  Then one day I wanted a blinkie for one of my blogs and oh my gosh the rest is history.  Anyway, one of the fundamental basics of making any custom graphic is to save it in a format that can be changed later if needed.  In this case I save custom made graphics as a .psd file.

Quite some time ago I made a custom 125 x 125 for my cooking blog.  This particular image involved at least 4 layers so when I decided to update the font for the new blog look I immediately looked for the .psd file.  Apparently in my ultimate wisdom back in 2008 I failed to save the .psd file.  I had the ,jpg file but not the .psd for easy editing.  Now this was a bit annoying as I basically had to start all over where what I should have been able to do was open the .psd change the font then save in both formats.  When it comes to something with only a few layers this is not so much of a problem but some of my graphics have over 20 layers so re-creating from scratch would be a pain.  I learned a valuable lesson to make sure I save in the raw, edit ready format as well as the web ready format!

Garden Gnome
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