Creating featured slider images in Photoshop

Making the homepage featured slider look great is very important for making a lasting first impression on your visitors.

You should definitely read our tutorial on controlling the featured slider, but creating appropriate images deserves a tutorial on it’s own.

First of all, you need to have professional looking images ready to use on your website. Stock images are not really good for this purpose, since even though they look good, they look “fake” in the sense that people will be able to tell that they are not of your establishment.

Remember that restaurants, bars, coffee houses, etc. are all local businesses, and that’s what people want to see and feel.

Once you have your professional images, you’ll want to fade out the sides of your images, to make it blend with the featured slider backgrounds. We created a Photoshop file for you to use, you can download it here.

The file includes detailed instructions on how to use it:

1. Replace the “example image” layer with an image of your choice
2. Click the color thumbnail on the “Right Fade” and “Left Fade” layers, and modify them to your chosen color. You’ll want to set exactly the same color for both layers, this creates an even fade effect on both sides of the image.
3. Save as a jpg or png, and place the image into a slide on your website, making sure the slide background color you set on the slide edit screen is the same as the fade color you chose in step 2.

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. We highly recommend you download and make use of the attached PSD file, it will make your featured slides look really nice.