Converting HTML to PSD can be tricky, but screen capture or using the print command in web browsers can work. Editing is necessary due to text and visual artifacts. Other Adobe programs may be better for complex websites.
Many website designers have used Adobe® Photoshop® to quickly prototype a website before committing the design to a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) file, and there are many programs that can convert a Photoshop® document (PSD ) to an HTML document, but there are very few utilities that convert HTML to PSD. An important tip when converting is to make sure that any dynamic content, such as applets, animations, or media, has a static display or has been converted to a placeholder image so that it converts correctly. There are a few tricks that can be used to convert HTML to PSD, such as using the print to file feature in most web browsers to create a Portable Document Format (PDF) file that can be opened in Photoshop®. Regardless of the method used to convert HTML to PSD, eventually the resulting page will require some modifications, such as isolating and moving elements of a page to different layers or sharpening the text on the page to remove aliasing which occurs naturally during conversion, be acceptable.
Photoshop® PSD documents inherently contain rasterized images, so they are stored primarily as a collection of pixels. HTML is a language designed to provide formatting and layout instructions more similar to vector graphics such as used by Adobe® Illustrator®. Converting HTML to PSD involves finding a way to convert the pixels that were rendered in your web browser into an image file format that Photoshop® can read.
There are two easy ways to effectively convert HTML to PSD. The first is to use a screen capture program, capturing each viewable segment of the website and then stitching them together within Photoshop®. This has the benefit of accurately capturing what you see on screen, so animations and other dynamic content doesn’t have to be removed, but it has the downside of being a fairly messy process. Also, screen captures of a website will have a pixel resolution set and the image may appear differently on separate monitors, as there is no color correction.
A second way to convert HTML to PSD is to use the built-in print command implemented by most web browsers. This will create a file, sometimes an image, sometimes a PDF, which Photoshop® will be able to open and modify. When using this method, dynamic content, applets, animations, and scripted images may not print correctly, and complex formatting or frames on a document may appear as disconnected areas within the PSD document. Replacing dynamic content with placeholder images of the same size or scale can solve some of these problems, although complex formatting with cascading style sheets (CSS) and frames could still cause problems.
When using a raster graphics program such as Photoshop®, you need to do some editing on the resulting image from an HTML to PSD conversion. Text typically becomes very aliased, and sometimes there are visual artifacts such as small, faded borders around elements, or small graphics that fade due to scaling. For a highly complex website with multiple elements, using other programs, such as Adobe® Illustrator or Adobe® InDesign®, may be a better choice and save time.
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