Chapter 13. Using Layers in Other Applications
This book has looked at layers in great detail, and now it's time to investigate the Photoshop document format itself, and how it interacts with other applications.
Photoshop's first release was in 1988 for the Apple Macintosh only. Since then, the application has come a long way, adding major features such as layers and layer styles, which means that the Photoshop file format now has to support many more features than it did then.
This long history, coupled with consistently innovative updates, led to Photoshop becoming the market leader and industry standard it is today. In turn, the PSD file has become a ubiquitous format that nearly all other image editors have to support to one degree or another.
This chapter looks at the Photoshop PSD format in some detail, and also shows how to tweak the way Photoshop saves and handles files. You'll learn about other file formats that support Photoshop layers. Finally, the chapter looks at a range of other applications, from Illustrator through to Flash and QuarkXPress, and reveals how these applications deal with layered Photoshop files.
It's not very glamorous stuff, but it's useful nonetheless. Sure, a file format doesn't have the appeal of an elegant drop shadow or a really nice piece of typography, but at 2 a.m. one day, when you're trying to work out how to save a layered TIFF file to send to your printers, this chapter might just save you!
Understanding the PSD Format
The PSD (Photoshop Document) ...
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