The overhauled type engine represents one of the most broad-based improvements to the product: It offers most of the type tools available in illustration and desktop-publishing apps including paragraph text, hyphenation and justification, single- or multiline-composer layout options, baseline shift, and on-page text editing. In addition, Adobe has streamlined the Effects- and Adjustment-layer interface to give you one-click access to the different settings, as well as the ability to save Effects-layer settings as Layer Styles. Unfortunately, the "one efficient dialog" for Layer Effects dialog is so large it obstructs most of the image, so you can't easily preview changes -- the collapsible palette in ImageReady works better.
Other crowd-pleasing tools include Liquify, an interactive image-warp filter that, strangely enough, doesn't appear on the "Filter" menu. The Liquify algorithms impressed us: We gave a digital porcupine a perm, bigger eyes, and longer teeth without noticing any artifacts when we printed it on an Epson Stylus Photo 2000P. We also welcomed the new crop tool that hides areas that have been cropped out (which gives you a better sense of how the new image will actually look) and -- finally -- a print preview.
One of the most important new features is the support for vector "shapes." Although everyone ultimately benefits from Photoshop's newfound capability to store vector paths as layer objects, print folks will be most pleased: now you can output clipping paths at output resolution automatically instead of rasterizing them. Combined with the abilities to save PDF and TIFF files as multilayered documents with annotations and workflows with check-in and check-out, the program makes file exchange, soft-proofing, and collaborative creation much more accurate and effective.
We don't dispute the usefulness of the shapes tool, but we do take issue with the implementation. When you create a square shape, for example, the program actually creates a square clipping path linked to a new layer. In order to "fill" the square with a colour, you fill the entire layer with the colour. This means that cutting and pasting simply don't work intuitively anymore.
On one hand, this provides a natural programmatic transition between Photoshop's existing Paths and the idea of objects; you can save any Path as a shape. Furthermore, there are certainly precedents for this implementation. But you can't automatically save Paths as shapes. The option to do that is under the "Edit" menu rather than off the "Path" palette, and many so-called "advanced" Photoshop users have never even used Paths. As a result, the implementation poses a usability and learning-curve issue for both new adopters and upgraders.
All the new Web tools contribute to the program's new level of complexity as well, but we doubt we'll hear a disgruntled peep from anyone using Photoshop for high-volume Web graphics production or who generates graphics for both print and Web publishing. You can now define slices within Photoshop, and, even better, now you can automatically generate slices within the bundled copy of ImageReady 3.0 based on your Photoshop layers.
This means, however, that you need to pay more attention to your file architecture than you might have in the past. But it's worth it, because when you combine it with the ability to save rollover behaviours as part of a layer style, you can shave hours off your design time. In fact, we created a fully functional nav-bar this way in less than five minutes. Then we saved all the nav-bar slices as a set and exported only those slices to HTML -- ready to reuse elsewhere across a site.
Furthermore, Photoshop now allows you to specify different optimisation parameters for each slice -- sort of. We used GIF on all the slices with text, then set the rest to a highly compressed JPEG. To set varying levels of JPEG compression throughout the image, you must create an alpha channel for each section you wish to set individually.
We're also glad to see Droplets finally turn up in Photoshop, along with the essential Fit Image command -- which you'll find buried in the Automate menu. Droplets let you save EXE versions of Actions, and you can then drag and drop files from Explorer onto the Droplet to perform batch operations. Fit Image is a subtle little tool that automatically resises an image to fit within a given size. It lets you resize an image to fit either its horizontal or vertical constraint in a single step, which is another combination destined to shave hours off high-volume Web-graphics production.
Finally, a word on colour management -- Adobe thankfully hasn't touched it this time. The interface has changed for the better, however; it's now easier to determine exactly what your profile status is for any given image, and to quickly change for different output devices.
Adobe Photoshop 6.0
Company: Adobe
Ph: 02 9778 4100; Fax: 1300 550 405
Price: ERP AU$1400; Upgrade from versions 4 and 5.5, ERP AU$417
Rating: 4 Star
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