Product Reviews

After taking Photoshop into new dimensions with version 5.0, Adobe has steered clear of ground-breaking features for its latest upgrade. Version 5.5 adds enough new tools and functions to make the upgrade appeal to a wider audience, but for designers who work solely in printed media, it's a rationalisation of existing technologies rather than a break with the past. It's those who repurpose their work for the Web who'll be most interested in this new version.

Photoshop 5.5 includes a range of new features which are designed to improve online workflow. Adobe's Web-preparation software, ImageReady, is now bundled free with Photoshop in its upgraded version 2.0 form, and tighter integration between the two applications makes them more complementary than ever.

GIF and JPEG previews ensure you see exactly what you'll get with different compression methods and, using ImageReady 2.0, you can create complex sliced images, JavaScript-enabled rollover buttons, and much else besides. In addition, Photoshop 5.5 adds some highly sophisticated masking and erasing tools, as well as a new Art History brush.

Webbed feat Optimising artwork for Web delivery is the cornerstone of the upgrade. As well as providing a one-click link to ImageReady, Photoshop 5.5 has its own fully-fledged preview facility for creating Web graphics. The core component is the Save For Web feature, which opens a dialog box that displays your original image, the optimised image, or the two together in a split screen. It can also show a four-panel view, so you can compare different compression methods and decide on the best trade-off between image size, download time and quality.

Each of the four panes can be set to show your chosen compression method (GIF, JPEG, or the new PNG-8 and PNG-24), as well as the degree of compression - number of colours, JPEG compression mode, GIF diffusion method, and so on. There's also a lossy GIF compression algorithm that makes GIF images even smaller.

The colour table shows all the colours used in the image, and selected colours can be snapped to the standard 216-colour Web-safe palette. Individual or multiple colours can be deleted from the palette to give full control over the finished graphic, and you can set a matte colour so irregular image edges blend with the background colour of your page. It's also possible to compare how the results will look when viewed on either a Mac or a Windows machine.

Compressed file sizes are shown, as well as typical download times using a 28.8Kbits/sec modem. A maximum file size can be set, and Photoshop will try many variations to see which comes closest. Frequently, the best results occur when Photoshop calculates the optimisation itself, although any settings can be overridden. Images can also be resized for Web repurposing, either by percentage, or by destination size in pixels.

Photoshop 5.5's Web-safe checkbox limits the range of colours viewed to the 216 standard Web colours. In addition, you can choose to show only Web-safe colours in the Color palette's colour ramp; as well as displaying RGB and CMYK colours, the sliders can display hexadecimal indices, the sliders themselves snapping to the nearest Web-safe marker.

ImageReady or not You can create standalone Web graphics with more accuracy than ever before. But for more complex designs - the graphical content of a Web page, for instance - you need to switch to ImageReady. This can be done with a single click: at the bottom of the Tool palette there's a button which opens your image in ImageReady, prompting you to save the illustration in Photoshop first. The two programs now look so similar that their toolbars are almost indistinguishable. All the standard editing tools (brushes, Cloning tool, selection tools, and so on) are built into ImageReady, so you can perform most adjustments without returning to Photoshop.

Photoshop images open in ImageReady with all layers and type intact. Like Photoshop, ImageReady 2.0 includes Layer Effects; unlike Photoshop, these effects are expanded to include a Gradient/Pattern palette, making it simple to create Web buttons in an instant. Any image can be saved as a pattern, so you can build your own libraries and apply them instantly. In addition, a Styles palette shows a graphical representation of user-defined combinations of effects, so it really does take just a click to assign styles to layers. ImageReady's Layer Effects also differ from Photoshop's in that each effect has an associated floating palette, so effects can be tweaked without opening a separate dialog box. Photoshop, however, can't read ImageReady's gradient and texture effects (although they become visible again when going back to ImageReady).

ImageReady 2.0 offers a few tools Photoshop doesn't, the most significant of which is a rounded rectangle selection tool. It also lets you create filled rectangles and ellipses directly, without having to fill a marquee selection (they're drawn automatically onto new layers).

ImageReady also works differently with type. All the features of Photoshop's Type dialog box - font, size, leading, alignment, kerning and antialias methods - are offered in their own floating palette, which makes editing type more intuitive and interactive. However, type size in ImageReady is shown in pixels rather than points.

Slice of life ImageReady's new Slicing technology allows images to be divided into user-defined rectangular sections. This is important when creating JavaScript effects, such as rollover buttons or other HTML links. Slices are automatically numbered, and HTML code generated to define the composite page. Using the optimisation preview facility, you can assign different compression methods to each slice - an area rich in detail could be saved as a JPEG, while simple backgrounds could be rendered as lossy GIFs. As the previews are so accurate, you can see at a glance how well differently compressed slices match up. Slices can be created from selections, from guides, or by dragging with the Slicing tool. The Slice palette also allows URLs and other information to be attached to each slice.

Roll with it ImageReady 2.0 is now JavaScript enabled, allowing the creation of multi-state buttons. To create the button, first make a new slice from the selection and use the Rollover palette to create new states - Over, Down, Click, Out, and so on. Buttons can be re-coloured or re-shaped, and Layer Effect variables changed for each state - by changing the angle of a bevel, for instance, a raised button can look pressed. All parameter changes are remembered for each button state, and not assigned globally.

As in ImageReady 1.0, animated GIFs are created by defining a new frame for each stage in the animation, and moving or hiding elements in each one. The illusion of movement can be produced by tweening between frames, and the Animation palette used to set duration and optimise the resulting GIF. Simple GIFs can be created quickly and easily in this way, without the need to use a separate application.

ImageReady itself can dynamically preview animated GIFs, but not rollover button states. A single keystroke, however, will open the current

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document in your preferred browser - putting an alias of either Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer in the appropriate ImageReady file will add it to the list. The browser window will also display all the HTML code used in the page, while providing previews of GIFs and rollover states. The beta version tested had trouble showing animated GIFs accurately in Navigator, which caused the application to quit, although there were no problems with Explorer.

The great erase Of the changes to Photoshop itself, most significant are the three new ways of erasing unwanted image areas. First is the Magic Eraser, a combination of the Magic Wand and the delete key. Set the tolerance, just as you would with the Magic Wand, click on the unwanted portion of the image, and areas of similar tonal range disappear. If your base image is a single background layer, the tool automatically turns this into a true layer so the erased portions are transparent rather than white. It gives a sharp cut-off between erased and non-erased areas, especially when working on images previously saved as JPEGs, with no feathering to blend the transition. This can easily result in ugly, blocky edges in the erased area. But one advantage of the Magic Eraser is its ability to perform either contiguous or non-contiguous selection. Contiguous selections are linked in a continuous area; non-contiguous selections find all areas of similar tonality within the entire image or a pre-selected area. This makes the tool perfect for, say, removing the sky from a complex interlocking shape.

Far better is the Background Eraser, which operates similarly to Extensis' MaskPro plug-in, except it works directly on the image rather than through a dialog box. The Background Eraser comprises a circle (set by the current brush size) with a crosshair in the middle. Pixels directly beneath the crosshair are sampled, and any pixels in the circle that fall within the tolerance range are erased, so you can brush right up to the edge of areas you are retaining - if the crosshair doesn't touch them, their brightness values won't be sampled. There are three sampling methods: Continuous, in which the pixels beneath the cross-hair are taken as the centre of the tolerance value, wherever the cursor is; Once, in which only the first pixel you clicked on sets the erase parameter; and Background Swatch, where the current background colour is the one to be erased (although the tolerance settings still apply). In addition, you can set the current foreground colour to be safe from deletion. This is, by any standards, a powerful and easy-to-use eraser that's probably worth the upgrade in itself.

The third erasing tool is the new Extract command, which performs accurate cut-outs via a separate dialog box, and works in a series of steps. First, use the Edge Highlighter to draw a brushstroke covering the borders of the object you want to keep. Then use the Fill tool - a paintbucket - to fill the area you want to retain. The boundary is shown as a translucent red band and the filled area in green, so you can see exactly which portions of the image are selected (see the image above). Clicking on the Preview button will show you the image with the background deleted and antialiased, with enough transparency around 'difficult' edges to make them convincing in a montage. Once the preview is complete, you can choose to view the resulting image with a standard checkerboard transparency background or with a grey, black or white matte. You can even choose your own colour to view in the background, or view the image's mask itself. Extract is a fine tool which will work well even on complex images.

True to type The Type tool has undergone minor adjustments, with the addition of Underline, Faux Bold and Faux Italic styles (for fonts which don't have these styles as options). In addition, there are three different antialias styles: Crisp, Strong and Smooth. Which you choose depends on the job in hand, but the Strong mode will significantly improve the appearance of antialiased type for on-screen or Web delivery.

Making History The new Art History brush will paint impressionist strokes based on the current History palette. Perform any combination of filters or colour adjustments, save them as a snapshot, and use this as the cloning source. Brushstrokes available include Dab, Tight, Loose and Curl, and can create a variety of Van Gogh-style images. The end result, though, looks like a cross between a painting-by-numbers set and a loose-knit sweater. An interesting plaything, but hardly an everyday tool.

Bits and pieces A tiny icon, just 16 x 11 pixels, appears in a Photoshop 5.5 image's title bar, showing a minuscule preview of the saved image. Kodak PhotoCD import is now faster (Photoshop 5.0 took a notoriously long time to open a folder of PCD images). And a new Layer Effects option, Colour, will fill a layer with a specified colour using the standard range of apply modes. A new quick-fix command, Auto Contrast, complements the old Auto Levels, and generally does a better job.

The History palette's Snapshot feature now offers three options: Full Document, which stores all layers intact; Merged Layers, which stores a composite image; and Current Layer, which stores just the active layer. This will reduce disk traffic for those who use snapshots a lot.

Like the new Magic Eraser, both the Magic Wand and Fill (paintbucket) tools now have non-contiguous options, so you can select or fill similar tones that don't connect without having to use the Color Range dialog box.

The Contact Sheet, which creates a document of thumbnail images from a specified folder, now includes the name of the file as a caption to each thumbnail. But, annoyingly, it only includes the first dozen characters of the file name; if you want to index a group of files with the same name but numbered sequentially (for instance, 'Camera Shoot 001'), you end up with a page of thumbnails all named 'Camera Shoot...' instead.

There's an automation feature called Picture Package. Aimed at photographers, it will take any image and duplicate it on a new page in a variety of ways, just like the multiple photo-shoot images supplied after school photos. For most Photoshoppers, it'll be redundant, but it does show the power of automation.

One useful automation feature is the ability to create a Web page, complete with HTML code, from a folder of images. It may not be in the forefront of cutting-edge design, but for those in a hurry, it does enable you to get your images onto the Web in a matter of minutes.

Image conscious In tandem, Photoshop 5.5 and ImageReady 2.0 will cater for most Web requirements. While there's still no vector path technology - such as that found in Fireworks - most common effects can be produced quickly and more easily than ever before.

A few anomalies between the two applications stand out. Although care has generally been taken to provide compatibility, some features don't match up - for instance, option-command-z steps back through History states in Photoshop, while in ImageReady the keyboard shortcut is just command-z. Type and layer effects are applied in Photoshop through dialog boxes, while ImageReady uses floating palettes.

Some ImageReady features - such as round-cornered rectangles, pattern fill swatches and shape-creation tools - really ought to be included in Photoshop. Similarly, some common Photoshop adjustments such as Colour Balance, Posterize and Curves are unaccountably missing from ImageReady.

Designers who don't yet produce any Web work will still find the new features offered by Photoshop 5.5 worth the upgrade. But it is for those who work in both electronic and conventional media that the new bundle will prove of most value.