Adobe Photoshop

Every new version of Photoshop has delivered significant, noteworthy improvements. Witness: Photoshop 4.0 unveiled Layers and Actions; Photoshop 5.0 brought us the History Palette and Layer Styles; Photoshop 6.0 introduced Shapes. Hence, Photoshop 7.0's perfunctory, should-have-been-there-earlier enhancements, such as the new file browser and updated paint engine, are a bit of a letdown. For the first time, we're not convinced that every Photoshop devotee and graphics professional must upgrade. But, as far as graphics apps go, Photoshop is still the best, most sophisticated image-editing software available. If you don't own an earlier version and want the best image editor on the market--or need it to run on OS X--version 7.0 is the best of the bunch.

More of the same
Photoshop 7.0's standard Adobe look and feel, complete with drop-down palettes and menu options, remain relatively unchanged. But Adobe has introduced a few cool improvements, including the handy Tool Presets option, which lets you change and save custom parameters for any tool to a quick-access palette. (With Tool Presets you can, for instance, define a 4-by-6-inch, 300dpi crop box and save it as a preset.)

Along the same lines, you can now save custom tool-palette layouts as Workspaces so that you no longer have to recustomize palettes every time you open a project. A Windows Explorer-like file browser, similar to the Photoshop Elements file-management system, provides a welcome, if somewhat overdue, way to sort and locate your projects: the new browser lets you organize projects by name, date, resolution, and a number of additional parameters.

Brushes with greatness
You'll appreciate the aforementioned Workspaces, especially once you try Photoshop's slightly updated paint engine with its full-on brushes palette. Like Corel's realistic painting implements in Procreate Painter, Photoshop's improved tools now let you vary hue, opacity, and flow for brushes such as pastels, oils, and charcoal. The result is a more real-world painting experience than before. Better still, the Brushes palette now lets you set many more dynamic brush parameters, including jitter, color, and shape.

With all these improvements, Photoshop's brushes are still no match for Painter's. With Photoshop, your paint doesn't have any viscosity, so the results look fairly flat. And, despite the Brushes palette's newfound flexibility, it could use a few more improvements. For example, although Photoshop supports the Wacom Intuos2 tablet (with which we tested the software), the program could use a summary view of which tools and effects you've customized to respond to stylus pressure or tilt. Surprisingly, Photoshop also lacks a velocity control option that would allow brush size and similar parameters to work with your painting speed.

On autopilot
Even so, Adobe hasn't lost sight of Photoshop's primary purpose: image editing. To that end, version 7.0 adds two interesting tools to its image-editing arsenal. The Healing Brush makes quick and seemingly magical work of erasing wrinkles, minor skin defects, and other small flaws. For instance, though we couldn't quite restore the bloom to an old photo of a rose, we easily took a few days off its age. The Auto Color adjustment tool, for its part, essentially removes color casts from your photos, such as the green hue caused by fluorescent lights, and fixes the tonal range.

Thankfully, the new features don't require much more system overhead. In our casual tests on a dual-processor Athlon XP 1900+ system, application load time increased by about only 25 percent--roughly six-tenths of a second. When we ran Photoshop's Web- page-builder macro (which creates an HTML document from a directory of images and saves it locally) on a directory of 77 files, we saw a 35 percent jump--a mere 30-second difference.

Web enhancements
Adobe's bundled sister app, ImageReady, boasts a few small improvements of its own, including updates to the Rollovers palette. ImageReady 7.0 also introduces some useful image output tools: for instance, you can now create dithered transparencies for GIF files.

To buy or not to buy
Without a doubt, Photoshop remains the premier image-manipulation package in its class. If you rely heavily on some of Adobe's newly improved functions, such as painting, or you want to take advantage of OS X's improved graphics engine, you'll want to run out and buy the new version as soon as you can. Otherwise, this upgrade is more of a luxury than a necessity.

When an application like Photoshop gets upgraded, you can't help but prick your ears up and pay attention. Used in some way or another by every designer in the world, Adobe's flagship product has built up a reputation over the past five years as being a stable, intuitive and feature-packed
application for print and Web production.

It would be impossible to cover even a fraction of Photoshop's features, which include just about every image editing, enhancing and printing feature you could wish for, in the space available here. In fact we can't even cover all of the new and improved facilities found in version 7 - there are just too many of them. So, instead, we'll concentrate only on the most important of the package's new features.

One of the most annoying limitations of Photoshop 6 and all its predecessors was its lack of an image browser, a feature available in just about every other image editing application, including those at only a fraction of its cost. Thankfully this has finally been rectified in Photoshop 7, which now boasts a powerful image browser that not only allows you to view thumbnails of the images in any directory on your PC, but also to view information on them, such as their colour profile, size, modification date, and even any attached Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) information generated by the likes of a digital camera.

Photoshop's painting facilities have also been improved, making it easier to choose the size, shape and dynamics of the brush you want. Some completely new features have also been added to the brush section, which amongst other things allow you to accurately simulate traditional types of painting techniques should you wish to. And you can now even combine two different brush types when painting, which allows you to produce some quite amazing results.

Photoshop's image editing and enhancing facilities have also improved. You'll now find it even easier to automatically correct colours in a photograph, for example, and thanks to some additions and tweaks in its Liquify facility, you'll find making precision distortions or adding certain types of special effect an absolute doddle. Two completely new photo enhancing tools have also been added to Photoshop 7 - the healing brush and patch tool - which together make invisibly removing blemishes, scratches, dusk and wrinkles from scanned images a pleasure rather than a chore.

A great deal of progress has also been made in terms of Photoshop's Web-oriented facilities. By far the most useful of these is the new Rollover palette to be found in ImageReady, a tightly integrated but separate, more Web-oriented application that comes bundled with Photoshop 7 as standard.

The new Rollover palette makes it far easier to create, edit and manage rollovers and image maps than was the case in previous versions of the package. However, it is still not quite as easy or intuitive as performing the same tasks with arch-rival Macromedia's Fireworks Web-specific image manipulation package.

Improvements have also been made in ImageReady's Web-specific output options, with a new and very useful dithered transparency option and a selective optimisation facility. This latter feature allows ImageReady to automatically keep text and vector shapes sharp while compressing the rest of the image when outputting an image as a Web page or as Web page elements; an extremely useful facility.

A few more general improvements to Adobe Photoshop 7 are also worthy of note - albeit briefly - such as the slightly more modern look to its user interface, support for Adobe Acrobat 5's security settings and, last but by no means least, a built-in multilingual spell checker.

Adobe - Photoshop 7 features - Verdict
Adobe Photoshop is undoubtedly a must-have application for anyone working with images, be they in print or on the Web, and the new features in version 7 simply underline this fact. The only real drawback to Photoshop is its price, which is a reflection of the fact that this product is aimed squarely at the professional end of the market, not at the home user who occasionally wants to dabble at image editing or Web site design.

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