Product Reviews

Another year, another Photoshop. Once again, Adobe has confounded our expectations by giving us not what we asked for, but what we needed. Many of the hoped-for additions have failed to materialise, but in their place we have a couple of seriously useful adjustment techniques, advanced type handling, better support for those working with video, and some interface enhancements that will ease your workflow and, hopefully, increase your productivity.

Where in the past Photoshop has provided meagre support for 16-bit images, it's now fully integrated across the board. However, for many the killer new feature is the Shadow/Highlight adjustment. This automates the process of enhancing and compensating for the bright and dark areas of an image. Rather than merely adjusting the contrast and levels, it can rescue and restore images that would otherwise take a huge amount of skill to work with. Even a bleached-out photograph of a man in a white suit can be turned into a useable image within a single dialog.

The Match Color dialog is designed to make the colours of one image consistent with those in another. It works well with images from a single photo shoot in which different lighting conditions may have been in operation between captures, but has more trouble matching radically different images, such as two holiday snaps.

Also hugely welcome is the updated (and lightning-fast) File Browser, which now loads thumbnail previews in an instant. Rather than sitting in the Palette Well, it now has its own button on the toolbar. Batch processing can now be commanded directly from the Browser without opening the files first, and keywords can be assigned to images for quick retrieval. The inclusion of Recent and Favourite items gives instant access to specific folders of images, and it's possible to rename, rotate, delete, flag and move or copy images from one location to another directly in the Browser.

The Filter menu has always been rather baffling to Photoshop newcomers. What is Plastic Wrap, exactly? Or Chalk & Charcoal? Now all the guesswork is taken out of the equation with a redesigned filter interface that shows graphic examples of what each filter does. Better still, you can now apply multiple filters without leaving the dialog, so you can try out different techniques and combinations before committing yourself to any of them.

The Filter Gallery has a large preview area that can be extended to any size your monitor has space for. The only filters included here, however, are the old painterly Gallery Effect filters; there's no Spherize, Ripple, Lighting Effects or Clouds, for example.

Hip replacement

The only new tool in Photoshop CS is the Replace Color tool. Working much like the old Replace Color dialog, it allows users to paint one colour over another using tolerance settings to determine the extent of the alteration. Although it's meant for such mundane tasks as red-eye removal, it's also great for changing the colour of, say, a car without having to enter a dialog.

Text on a path is a feature that many users have requested, and it has finally made it into Photoshop. At long last, you can set type running around a circle without having to resort to the distortions produced by the Warp Text feature. Text can be set horizontally or vertically, and the latter option allows you to run

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text end-on around any path.

Photographers will appreciate a set of new effects designed to simulate lens blur, as well as new Adjustment Layers that recreate the effect of different lens filters. The Camera Raw plug-in, which was previously available as a separate purchase, is now built in for those working with images from high-end digital cameras.

Layer sets can now be nested inside each other, so that one set can contain multiple subsets. Where in version 7 the only way to include multiple versions of an image in a single document was to create a separate layer set for each one (or use a memory-intensive Snapshot), Photoshop CS introduces Layer Comps. These are records of the current state of the Layers palette, which can include the visibility, position and appearance (presence of Layer Styles) of each layer. This is likely to be one of the most often-used features: comparing multiple states of a document can now be as simple as scrolling through each Comp in turn.

Photo opportunity

Photomerge, the panoramic image creation tool first introduced in Photoshop Elements, has finally made it into the parent program. It enables a set of images taken at the same location to be combined into a single panoramic view with extraordinary precision.

Recognising that many users still take photographs using conventional film cameras, Adobe has introduced a new Crop and Straighten command. Scan multiple images together on a flatbed scanner, and Crop and Straighten will intelligently split the resulting file into multiple images, each one perfectly aligned.

For those who like to tinker, Photoshop CS now allows users to customise keyboard shortcuts for virtually every menu item. All shortcuts must include either the command key or a function key, but you can add any other modifiers to build in instant access to any filter or operation.

Video and film makers are catered for with the introduction of non-square pixels to integrate Photoshop better with video software. The document presets now include a range of standard video sizes, which include guides for title-safe and action-safe areas.

Among the more esoteric additions are the ability to track every action on an image in a textual history file, create multi-page PDF presentations and slideshows, and edit the EXIF data on digital images without overwriting the image data. Photoshop CS can now support documents up to 300,000 pixels, with up to 56 channels per file.

Photoshop CS may not provide all the bells and whistles we'd hoped for - there's a lack of upgrades for filters such as Spherize, and there's still no Envelope Distortion - but the enhancements are significant. Layer Comps will quickly become part of your workflow and Shadows/Highlights has to be seen to be believed. The File Browser, previously a novel add-on ported from Elements, may now prove to be the asset management tool of choice for many users. Once again, this is an upgrade you can't miss.

Imageready

ImageReady, Photoshop's Web companion, has also been upgraded in line with the CS group. The new version offers easier manipulation of multiple objects, enhanced Flash export and leaner HTML. A new targeting system enables the creation of remote rollover slices and supports multiple sets within a single document. It's also possible to export a separate HTML file from each state of a document, and - as with Photoshop - individual states can be recorded using Layer Comps.

Dynamic data sets and variables can be created directly in ImageReady or imported from spreadsheets and databases. The Tables feature has also been enhanced, with the ability to set cells to pixel or percentage sizes to allow for flexibility when viewed in a browser. Nested tables, as well as control over the HTML generation method for tables, aids later hand-editing. Converting and processing both type and graphics is eased by the introduction of Conditional Actions.