Photoshop has long held its spot as the king of image editors. With a pack of regal pretenders, does the latest version still have that royal aura? Our First Take tells you what to expect.
Every new version of Photoshop has delivered significant improvements. 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, are a bit of a letdown. Based on our look at the beta, the final Photoshop 7.0 release won't be a must-have upgrade for all graphics professionals. 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, start saving for version 7.0, and stay tuned for our review of the final product, scheduled to launch next quarter.
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 4x6-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 sort projects by name or date and search them via keyword rather than by fishing through thumbnails in the crowded File > Open dialog.
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 standard 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 brush parameters, including texture, color, and shape.
Still, with all these improvements, Photoshop's brushes are no match for Painter's. With Photoshop, your paint doesn't have any viscosity, so the results look fairly flat. Despite the Brushes palette's newfound flexibility, it could use a few more improvements. For example, although Photoshop supports the Wacom Intuos2 tablet we tested it with, it 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 respond to 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 is handy. It removes color casts from your photos, such as the green cast caused by fluorescent lights, and fixes the tonal range.
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 the package's newly improved functions, such as painting, 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.
Adobe Photoshop 7
Company: Adobe
Release date: Q2 2002
Price: AU$1799, AU$339 upgrade
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 550 205
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