Product Reviews

Aside from apathy, poverty and naked terror, one of the main factors that has kept most Mac professionals from upgrading to Mac OS X is the lack of a native version of Photoshop. Version 7.0, currently in beta testing under the codename Liquid Sky, is that version, and it's due on the shelves by the spring.

MacUser has now seen a beta test copy, and over the following pages we detail the enhancements and differences evident so far. As with any beta test, it's important to remember the final product doesn't even exist yet. Although we wouldn't expect any big surprises, every feature may be subject to change. Bearing this in mind, let's take a look.

First impressions

The first thing you notice when running Photoshop 7.0 in OS X is that it still looks like Photoshop. Rather than seeing the switch to Aqua as an excuse to revamp its whole user interface, Adobe evidently felt it was best to keep things as familiar as possible.

All the icons have been redrawn with the soft-shaded effect that's de rigueur in OS X applications (Classic users also get the benefit of these), but the screen layout remains the same, with the toolbox at the left, the Options bar across the top and the palettes at the right. The only clear change to the toolbox is that the Airbrush icon has disappeared (it's now incorporated into the same fly-out as the Paintbrush and Pencil tools), and in its place is a sticking-plaster icon: this is the home of the new Healing Brush and Patch tools (see Software in use, p47).

The Palette Well, introduced in version 6.0, remains at the right-hand end of the Options bar, and each palette's integral menu now gives you an explicit option to dock it in the Well, rather than having to drag it up. Already present in the Well is a significant new palette, the File Browser.

The File Browser

The File Browser is an improved version of the tool offered in Photoshop Elements. It may seem odd for Adobe's flagship package to gain features from what's essentially a cut-down version of itself, but high-end applications are increasingly borrowing usability aids from consumer products as vendors realise that professionals don't mind having their lives made easier as well.

The File Browser is rather more helpful than your basic File Open dialog box; in a sense it's like an iPhoto for professionals. Folder structure is displayed at top left, with the complete, current path shown in the pop-up at top right. Below are previews of all the images in the current folder, regardless of format. Buttons at the foot of the window govern preview size and sort key (name, date, size or whatever). Clicking on any preview brings up full details at bottom left, including pixel size for most file types, not just native .PSDs.

A menu offers rotation in 90¼ increments: when you rotate a preview, the original file is unaffected, but if you double-click to load it into Photoshop, it's automatically rotated. You can also select multiple files in the preview pane, then rename them as a batch, with specific text, incremental serial numbers or letters, or today's date appended to each file name.

The File Browser palette, which can also be accessed from a Browse command on the File menu, can be moved and resized, and you can drag the borders between panes to change their relative size. This may not be an earth-shatteringly original feature, but it's well done and very handy.

A new icon at the top left of the Options bar heralds another convenience feature, Tool Presets (see Software in use, p46). There's also a Save Workspace function, which wasn't finished in our test copy but appears to work as you'd expect, letting you save the current arrangement of palettes and restore it later. Presumably reflecting the greater speed of today's Macs, all the Filter dialog boxes now provide much larger previews (see Interface overview, p44), and the Free Transform tool previews on the fly (see Before and after, above).

It would be irresponsible to comment on speed at this point, as optimisation is invariably one of the last tasks to be undertaken in any new release. Considerable speed differences were noted between Classic and OS X operation in the beta version, with some filters taking dramatically longer in OS X, but the finished product may correct or reverse this. We were pleased to find no visible differences in display quality: despite OS X's different graphics engine, Photoshop 7.0 rendered images identically to version 6 in both operating systems, which is exactly what most users would hope for.

Moving on to actual tools, it

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has to be said that innovations seem a bit thin on the ground. There certainly aren't any additions on the same scale as the introduction of vector shapes in version 6. On the other hand, a number of existing features have been augmented, the most significant of which are the Brushes.

Better Brushes

Previously, a Brush was defined either as an ellipse, with sliders for diameter, spacing, hardness, angle and roundness, or as a small image sample, with control only over spacing. In Photoshop 7.0, these types of definition persist as Brush Tips, which can now be combined into complex Brushes comprising up to two Tips.

A large number of new parameters govern the application of Brushes. You can set how many instances of each Tip are applied, how widely they scatter from the path followed, whether their Angle varies according to the path's direction, and so on. Randomness within given parameters, which Adobe calls 'jitter', can be applied to these parameters and others such as opacity or colour, and the degree of jitter can be linked to distance (Fade), stylus pressure on a graphics tablet, or even the thumbwheel control on third-party mice. You can also add a texture, again with a number of controls.

This is all very clever, and anyone using the program for fine art or experimental graphics will find they're able to produce far more interesting results than with Photoshop's previous Brushes. However, the controls are limited, and the way strokes combine on the artwork can only be governed by the usual Blend modes; there's no equivalent of the wet mixing effects found in Procreate's Painter. Although Photoshop 7.0's Brushes are more than a curiosity, it remains to be seen how valuable they are in practice.

Talking of Blend modes, there are five new ones, an unexpected and welcome addition. Vivid Light and Pin Light complement the existing Hard Light and Soft Light, while the Light, Dodge and Burn groups each gain a Linear option. We were unable to reverse-engineer the algorithms in the time available, but suffice it to say that the results are usefully distinctive. The number of Blend modes is now sufficiently high to raise the question of whether they need to be discrete modes or should be presented as a set of continuous and discontinuous controllers, but that's probably something for version 9.

Tweaks and enhancements

Various other tools and palettes have been tweaked, often purely for reasons of consistency or clarity ('Layer clipping masks' have become 'Vector masks', but work in the same way), but no other notable changes have made it into this pre-release. Of course, Photoshop is already rich in features, but extras such as envelope distortion have been on users' wish lists for years, and sadly look set to remain there a while longer.

A couple of important new features couldn't be tested at the time of going to press. In line with Adobe's efforts to integrate workflow between all its design applications, Photoshop 7.0 is equipped with workgroup functions which we can't test until we have finished copies of Photoshop and the Workgroup Server. It's also rumoured that Photoshop 7.0 will be fully AppleScriptable. This would be a big advance - currently, it's possible to call Actions via AppleScript, but not to script individual events directly - but the AppleScript Dictionary in the pre-release software was still as bare as Mother Hubbard's code cupboard, so we'll have to reserve judgement for now.

ImageReady, the Web graphics tool included with Photoshop, has made a huge leap in version number from 3 to 7.0. It's perfectly logical to bring it into line with Photoshop, as the two are inseparable. They're inseparable, however, to the point where ImageReady doesn't even merit its own entry in the manual, so it's not logical that they're still provided as separate applications.

In this pre-release version, we found a few functional enhancements except for the addition of Variable Data controls (see Software in use, p46) and, belatedly, a command to create a polygonal image map directly from a selection, though this wasn't yet working. Preview Document previews all aspects of a graphic (animation, rollovers, optimisation and so on) within the application, which is nice, although it doesn't remove the need for in-browser previewing. Interestingly, screen furniture such as palettes featured slightly different designs in ImageReady 7.0 compared with Photoshop 7.0, suggesting they could change before release.

Worth its wait?

A few weeks ago, we concluded that Adobe's decision to release the first Carbonized version of Illustrator many months later than Macromedia's FreeHand 10, but with many more new features, had pretty much been vindicated. The Photoshop strategy doesn't look quite so clever: not only is it late, but it's short of significant additions.

'Disappointing' would be too strong a word, and it seems churlish to suggest the upgrade should have had a more modest version number, such as 6.5: native compatibility with OS X is, in itself, too big a deal for an incremental release. It'll be a shame, however, if the final version doesn't quite manage to make us go 'ooh'.