Web Design and Development

I’m not sure what most of you do for your slicing technique in Photoshop, but I always had been old school and used the Marquee Tool. Most developers or graphic designers are taught to use the slicing tool, which annoys the crap out of me especially because of the Save For Web functionality, I can never get it to just save the image where I want it.

In the past I have always selected the area that I want to slice with the Marquee Tool, and went into the layers pallet, clicked on the options and chose Flatten Image. I could now copy that slice and open a new document, pasting in the copied image.

Then I found the biggest time saver of my career, cutting my slicing frustrations in half. What is it, you say? Its the Copy Merged option. I’m not sure how long this has been built into Photoshop but I do feel stupid if it has always been there.

Now, all you have to do is select the area you want to slice with the Marquee Tool, or any other selection tool you would like, then go up to the edit menu and select “Copy Merged” or better yet Shift+Ctrl+C and boom, no flattening of the image, meaning none of the hassle of having to go back in History to retrieve your layers. Now just click Ctrl+N for a new Document, Ctrl+V to paste, then Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S, and boom your in the “Save For Web” screen. Of Course for all the MAC user I’m sure you can figure out the MAC alternative.

Yeah, I might be behind with this, and I just saw this has been here since the first release of CS, but I never really looked because I always just did it the old school way. Feel free to comment about any slicing tips, or other time saving shortcuts in Photoshop.