website design - With the invention of CSS3, should a web designer use Photoshop?

I see that many designers create beautiful web design works in Photoshop, but now with the arrival of CSS3, when they want to change that to HTML & CSS, they simply start from scratch and create something around 80% of the final design using CSS3.

For example, they use border-radius, opacity, background gradient, box shadow and text shadow, and other CSS3 rules to get what they've created in Photoshop. Many times they only import an image from Photoshop, which is more like a brush work or a logo, or anything like that.

My question is, should web designers still use Photoshop for creating something, from which only 20% would be useful to them?

Can a web designer create the entire design directly in HTML & CSS without bothering to add another middle layer of creating a design in Photoshop, and then simply create the remained elements there?

Answer

Gotta disagree with everyone. Photoshop is not a tool for designing a web site. It's a tool for sketching out a web site. The web site should still be designed in the medium that it's in--which tends to be CSS, HTML and JS.

That doesn't mean you don't use Photoshop. But you certainly don't have to.

I'm a huge fan of not ever showing web site designs in photoshop to clients. It's not the medium the site will live in. Photoshop comps offer no ability to communicate interaction, device differences, browser idiosyncracies, clickability, responsiveness, etc.

Admittedly, in reality, a lot of the time you still need to show JPG mockups. Fine. Use Photoshop for that. But don't then take that PSD file and slice and dice it into a web site. That made sense in 1999. No so much today. Instead, take that PSD, and just use it as a guide. This is 'roughly what the site should look like but take into account the fact that it's being built in CSS/HTML/JS and accomodate as needed.

So, to answer the question:

Can a web designer create the entire design directly in HTML & CSS without bothering to add another middle layer of creating a design in Photoshop, and then simply create the remained elements there?

Yes. One can certainly do that. I've seen that done in parallel with PSD designers. The biggest problem with the PSD approach is when you're working on an agile team. Heavy files used for documentation (such as PhotoShop) become rather large burdens to the Agile process and end up adding more issues than they solve. We tend to then work in reverse...we sketch in PS as needed, and then design and build in HTML/CSS/JS. When we then need to make quick visual updates for meetings, we'll just screen-shot the working presentation layer markup, and slap it in PhotoShop and tweak quickly.