Product Reviews

Apple has waited a long time for the killer application to sell Mac OS X, and it has finally arrived: Photoshop 7.0 is now fully native and runs like a dream. However, there's plenty to entice Mac OS 9 users to upgrade.

The most useful tool is the File Browser, which had its first outing in Photoshop Elements. This provides a visual directory of folders of images, from which single or multiple images can be opened directly.

With a choice of three thumbnail viewing sizes, the File Browser makes short work of selecting the right image. You can also rotate thumbnails in the browser, and the original image will be rotated the next time you open it. The first time you open a folder in the File Browser it has to go through each image, and builds the thumbnails; thereafter, it simply refers to its disk cache, building the previews instantly (and automatically adding any new or changed files).

With such features as file deletion and batch renaming, as well as the ability to read thumbnails directly from digital cameras, it's a valuable image management tool.

On the brushes

The Brush technology has been completely overhauled: now you can add random, pressure, tilt or direction-based spacing, scaling, colour and rotation to brush strokes, among many other variations.

Brushes can paint with texture and noise, and a new Dual Brush mode allows any two brushes to be combined in a single stroke. Any brush can now be scaled indefinitely without losing the original brush definition. The new system brings Painter-like functionality to Photoshop, with fully customisable effects. Pressure sensitivity is now set for each brush rather than globally, which might confuse graphics tablet users, but this is easily overcome using the new Tool Presets palette.

Tool Presets, as the name implies, allows you to store custom settings for each tool. You might define one brush to be 100 pixels, soft-edged, using pressure sensitivity and painting in 100% yellow. A single click in the palette can change this to a 10-pixel, hard-edged brush painting with noise.

You can store as many presets as you like, and the palette is always to hand at the top left of the screen. Presets can be defined for any tools, so you could set a Crop tool variation to 640 x 480 pixels at 72dpi, or a Type tool preset to 24pt Myriad Bold, and retrieve both with a single click. Photoshop 7.0 can store different combinations of palettes and views as definable workspaces, which can be retrieved instantly depending on your current working mode.

As well as setting the opacity

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of brushes and other painting tools, there's now a Flow setting. This determines the maximum amount of ink that can be built up. For example, if the Flow is set to 50%, you'll never get more than 50% opacity when going back over painted areas in a single stroke.

The only completely new tool is the Healing tool, which comes in two flavours: the Healing Brush and the Patch tool. The brush works in the same way as the Clone tool: you click a source point then paint on the image. Unlike the Clone tool, the Healing Brush respects the shading of the target area, so you can now clone out scratches and blemishes without having to match the shading precisely - all you need to do is select a source area of a similar texture.

The Patch tool works by definining an area with a Lasso-like tool, and then dragging to a source area to fill in the same way. It's a hugely powerful innovation that makes photo retouching much easier.

Light fantastic

Three new Light modes, used by layers as well as brushes, complement Hard Light and Soft Light: Vivid, Linear and Pin Light are all variations on these two effects.

Many other small improvements are tucked away as well. The new Print Preview dialog box shows the current image as it will print on your selected paper. You can scale and position the image freely to make the best use of the space, or click a button to make it automatically print at the largest possible size. The new Pattern Maker builds regular tiles from rectangular selections, with a range of controls for smoothing and offsetting the resulting pattern. And while there are no new filters, all the old 'art' filters (Artistic, Sketch, Stylize and so on) have been remade with previews four times the size they were previously.

Users doing repetitive tasks will welcome the addition of AppleScript awareness, as well as the new 'droplet' creation. This makes icons on the Desktop perform a chosen set of Actions automatically.

Other enhancements include voice note annotation, an enhanced Liquefy filter and a tweaking of Free Transform so that scaling, rotation and distortions now take place in real time. (Previously, you had to wait until a handle had been dragged in order to see the results.)

Filter tips

Virtually all the old Photoshop filters work seamlessly with version 7.0, as long as you're running it in OS 9. None of the original third-party filters are OS X native by default, so it's a question of waiting for the developers to release Carbonized versions.

What's notable in Photoshop 7.0 is the omissions. Users had been expecting envelope and mesh distortion of the kind seen in Illustrator and After Effects, and while the filter previews are larger, most are still not full-screen.

This is probably the easiest upgrade for users to adapt to, with only the new Brush system causing any hiccups in terms of the new interface. The feature set may be less than users had expected, but what's there works well. Photoshop 7.0 may not have the must-have appeal of its predecessor, but it builds solidly on those foundations and is a worthy successor: it's still the only image editing program worth a second glance.