Adobe Photoshop
Unless you've been living in a cave or are quite simply dull, you'll have pretty much certainly have heard of Adobe Photoshop. The latest incarnation is Version 7, following unsurprisingly in the footsteps of Version 6.0 (or to be more precise 6.0.1). Adobe and Macromedia have been slugging it out against one another for supremacy in the graphics department, which each new release of Fireworks (Macromedia's offering) and Photoshop adopting more and more features - all good for the consumer!
After the usual painless installation (make sure you have no other Adobe apps open and you'll not even have to restart your machine!), Adobe Photoshop 7.0 on first impressions looked and felt very much like Adobe Photoshop 6.0 apart from a minor tinkling with the toolbar icons (nothing radical). To a certain degree I had expected this to be the case, especially as there had been such a leap between versions 5.5 and 6.0, and therefore I was only really expecting the tweaks to be superficial. As with the previous version, there is Adobe Image Ready included, except this time it is version 7 (a suitable tie-in).
One of my gripes from having done a lot of layout work and web graphics using Photoshop was that you often had to have an explorer window open in the background if you wanted to preview the various files you were working with. At least Adobe have included an inbuilt "browse" function very similar to the browse function that has been present in Paint shop Pro since time immemorial. The browser lets you search through directories, producing thumbnails, as well as displaying certain metadata for you - e.g. file type, creation date, file size etc. There are also various sorting options which is a welcome development so that you can "rank" your images e.g. by file size, height width etc. which is more useful that it sounds. To date I have experienced a few problems under Windows ME using the file manager, but Windows XP has not had any troubles... Similar to the Digital Camera Assistant in XP, you can also rotate pictures without opening them - great if you have a load of scanned pictures or pictures taken with a digital camera that are all landscape rather than being portrait orientation.
Another great photo related tool is the "Healing brush" which as the name might suggest "heals" a photo by removing the scratches, dust marks etc. to allow you to restore the photo to its former glory. The cloning effect allows you to copy lighting effects that have been added, and the patch tool allows you to work more precisely on a specific area. In Photoshop 6 the most considerable work over was given to the Text tool (it needed it!) and this time round the brushes tool has been given the face lift, and special effects and patterns can be added to a brush e.g. chalk with a leaf effect, which provides the user with.
Of course Image Ready which is an essential part of the bundle (as per Photoshop 6.0 there is a shortcut to toggle between the two) has also been given attention, as had the web-focus of Photoshop (clearly aimed at Fireworks which did this in its Version 4 as a swipe at Photoshop's version 5.5!). The web optimising process has been given the treatment to include improved transparency features, including the function "Map to Transparency", which allows you to select a colour in an image and for all occurrences of this colour to be then turned transparent - great for similar techniques to blue screen! And there is also a dithered transparency feature to allow for partial transparency - great for those gradual fills. A rollover palette has been included in ImageReady to help make it easier to produce killer rollovers, animated gifs and image maps, with rollovers being viewable in their various states.
There is also a new emphasis towards the mobile internet - Photoshop 7.0 features the new WBMP export format for PDAs, which was previously only possibly by saving an image as a Bitmap (.BMP) and using third party software, as well as Adobe's unified XMP format (intended for simultaneous use in print design, web design and E-books) (for more info visit: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/main.html) which has hitherto been included in Adobe InDesign 2.0, Illustrator 10 and Acrobat 5. The Web Gallery tool has been given a make over - there are new styles and colour schemes, improving greatly on previous offerings and there is also password protection for pictures - similar to the previously used plug-in from Digimarc, and its offerings work very well.
At the end of the day, most of the changes are merely like giving the product a general lick of paint, and there is no real departure from the tried and tested approach. System specs have not drastically altered - a P III processor is a recommended minimum, with 128Mb RAM and 280Mb hard disk space the recommended minimums, although it is highly unlikely that someone willing to fork out for this will be running a P III 600 Mhz machine in the first place. The OSes supported are from Windows 98 onwards, through ME and 2K to XP, although I have found a couple of teething problems unless ME - maybe more RAM will improve this. The software is also available for Mac (G3 or later, MacOS 9.1 or later, 128Mb RAM or more and 320Mb hard-disk space).
Finally the pricing: EUR 270 (quoted from Internet Professionnel Magazine (German) for an Upgrade (for users of Photoshop 4 and later only!) or a hefty £449 + VAT (£527.57) for the Mac or PC full versions (from dabs.com). Ultimately this is not one for your home user, but one for the pros to use, as the price tag reflects. The home user is far better off sticking to the Paintshop Pro type of software - cheap, relatively high on features, although this will remain the standard piece of software. Photoshop is very powerful but takes a while for the beginner to master - a lot of features are self explanatory, but not everything is clear if you have never used an Adobe product before in your life.
By rights it gets five stars for being a top product, but given the fact that there is not that much improvement on Photoshop 6.0.1 - I have kept both installed for the time being, I think it is only four stars for this product, although once the extended playtesting has occurred I'll gladly revise my judgment.
Reproduced with the permission of Dooyoo UK Ltd