Product Reviews

Adobe Photoshop has always dominated the world of computer-based photo editing, and following the seminal release of version 6, which added vector-based shape handling and an enhanced interface, its grip is stronger than ever. Now there's a new version designed to extend both Photoshop's capabilities and its lead over the competition.

Not much has changed in Photoshop 7's look and feel compared to version 6's radical revamp. The most obvious change is purely cosmetic, with new shaded tool icons that become subtly coloured when the mouse moves over them - fussy and ugly to my eye. Otherwise there's little new in the interface, apart from the ability to save your preferred arrangements of palettes as named workspaces that you can then load from the Window menu. It's a capability worth having, but doesn't make up for the fact that the control over open documents has been moved to a submenu, which adds an unnecessary step each time you want to change image.

As soon as you go to open a file, however, you'll appreciate Photoshop 7's first major advance - the introduction of visual file management. The new Browse command opens a File Browser palette that lets you view thumbnails of all your graphics files. In Expanded view the File Browser offers an Explorer-style view with a panel down the left-hand side containing a tree pane. Here, you can choose which folder to view, a preview pane that shows an enlarged preview of the currently selected file and a metadata pane that provides details such as image mode, file size and resolution, along with any text information stored in the file; for instance, digital camera EXIF data. Alternatively, you can save screen real estate by just viewing the main thumbnail pane.

The main purpose of the Browser is to select images, and there are a number of options designed to help. You can view your thumbnails in three sizes and sort them based on 11 parameters, ranging from filename and creation date through to copyright and colour profile setting. You can also create your own order by quickly applying a 'Rank' setting - handy when separating finished images from ongoing work. Additional file management capabilities include the ability to create a new folder and to rename and delete files, though irritatingly you can't copy and paste them.

The File Browser also offers two capabilities particularly suited to digital camera users. The Batch Rename command lets you quickly apply meaningful names to multiple files, based on a naming template, while the ability to rotate images by 90-degree increments is essential for re-orienting portrait photos. Disappointingly, though, only the thumbnail is rotated until you actually open the image, presumably to avoid JPEG deterioration. This can't compete with true lossless JPEG rotation and, generally, the File Browser doesn't match up to dedicated solutions like CompuPic. If you haven't already got yourself some form of image management, however, the File Browser will radically improve your working life.

power brusher

By default, the File Browser is stored away in the Palette Well so that it's only ever one click away. The same is true of the second major addition to Photoshop 7 - the new Brushes palette. Photoshop is so dominant in the field of bitmap editing that it might seem strange that its brush handling should need improving, but, surprisingly, its controls have always been weak. Essentially, all you had access to were a few brush variations and the ability to change basic settings, such as dab size and spacing.

That's certainly no longer the case. When you select the new Brushes palette, the first thing you'll see is a scrolling list of over 50 brush presets. These start off fairly traditionally, but by the bottom you've got brushes that look like charcoals, chalk, watercolours, and others that look like stars, grass and nothing on earth. And these are only the defaults. There are 11 more libraries of brushes that you can load, ranging from Dry Media and Drop Shadow through to Special Effects and Wet Media.

The control over each brush is astonishing. To begin, you can change the brush tip shape and set its size, angle and spacing just as you could in the past. What's completely new is the control offered by the 11 settings - Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Texture, Dual Brush, Colour Dynamics, Other Dynamics, Noise, Wet Edges, Airbrush, Smoothing and Protect Texture - running down the left of the palette. Each setting has a checkbox next to it and, if you select one, you'll see the behaviour of your brush change radically. Select Noise and the brush stroke becomes grainier; select Airbrush and your paint pools if you keep the brush static.

This is impressive enough, but for the first six settings the control is in a different league altogether. Click on Shape Dynamics to control the 'jitter' or amount of change in the brush's size, angle and roundness, and tie these in to factors such as the pen pressure, tilt and direction. Select Scattering to control the limits within which each dab is positioned along the stroke, while Colour Dynamics allows you to control the colour limits of each dab.

The creative possibilities are absolutely phenomenal, particularly as exactly the same brush options are available for use with the History brushes, retouching tools and especially the Clone Stamp tool - perfect for quickly turning an existing photo into a work of art. There's not quite the same range of power as there is in a dedicated art program like Corel Painter (version 7 reviewed issue 85, p180), but it's a close-run thing. And Photoshop 7's power is more self-contained, easier to get to grips with and, best of all, provides a brush preview so you can see what sort of brush you're building.

With so many creative options, the danger is that things can easily get out of control. How, for example, can you find a particular brush that you created earlier in your work? Photoshop's solution for this is its Tool Presets palette. This lets you save favourite brush variations - including their current colour if you want - that you can then access either from the Tool Presets palette or directly from the context-sensitive Property Bar. The capability is available for all tools so that you could create different Crop tool presets for creating different

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image sizes. You can also create and load libraries of presets so that you could have separate collections for your favourite artistic and retouching brushes.

One consequence of Photoshop's new handling is that the former Airbrush tool is now treated as a pooling variation that can be used with all brushes. This means there's a hole on the Toolbox that needs to be filled, and the replacement Photoshop 7 provides is its new Healing brush. It's a slightly disconcerting tool, since it works in two passes - as you paint, the brush acts like the Clone Stamp tool, but, as soon as you stop, the cloned area is processed and merged into the underlying pixels. By preserving lighting, shading and texture, the Healing tool's main function is for removing dust, scratches and wrinkles, hence its name. The Patch tool is a variation on the theme designed to work on selections, but the most I could get out of it was some crude blurring.

Another new feature that should please photo editors, especially the more occasional hit-and-run user, is the AutoColour command. This is a one-off command with no parameters, much like the existing AutoContrast and AutoLevels options, that instantly brings out the full colour range in an image. It doesn't always come up with the goods, but sometimes it's a revelation, and in many cases it will be the only colour-correction command you'll need.

For distorting images, the existing Liquify dialog has been given a make-over, with new zoom, pan and undo capabilities that practically turn it into an application in its own right. New power has also been added with a Turbulence brush that acts like a cross between the Bloat, Pucker and Twirl tools, ideal for producing smoke-style effects. You can also load and save meshes, which is useful for applying the same distortions to multiple images, for saving ongoing projects and for experimenting on low-resolution versions of an image.

The Liquify and Extract commands have both been relocated to the Filter menu alongside the new Pattern Maker command. Again, this takes the form of a full dialog with its own tools and parameters, but its function is much simpler. You select a rectangular area of the image and hit the Generate command to have Photoshop turn the selection into a repeating pattern. You can change factors such as size, offset and smoothness, but the results are largely out of your hands. Hitting Generate repeatedly comes up with variations that are automatically stored as a Tile History. As well as applying the tiled effect to the image as a whole, you can save the individual tile as a pattern preset.

It's a useful utility, but that's about it in terms of major new creative additions. Minor enhancements include the redesigned and more accessible Text tool and palettes, and the ability to find-and-replace and check spelling across text layers.

There are also five new blend modes and some extra Style libraries. Plus, the vector tools now work in a slightly different way, with the Pen options more integrated and all tools defaulting to adding multiple objects to their own layers. Each change is welcome, but, after the explosion of creative functionality in version 6, I expected more.

output power

In terms of output power, Photoshop's printing capabilities are largely unchanged, although the Print Options dialog has sensibly been renamed Print with Preview and there's a new Print One Copy command with no dialog at all. Disappointingly, you can still only print one image at a time. You can work around this using the Automate | Picture Package command to cut and paste multiple resized photos into a new image. This now offers different page sizes, as well as the ability to overlay labels and to produce multiple copies of the same page.

The Automate | Web Galleries command has been given a similar revamp with more templates and watermarking capabilities. Frankly though, it's embarrassing that Photoshop relies on crude macros to perform such central tasks, especially as they both fall over if they come across file types that they don't recognise.

When outputting images to file, the major advance is the ability to set 40-bit or 128-bit encryption when outputting to Acrobat format so that the PDF can only be opened by a user with the correct password. You can also control whether the image is then printed or changed, though these settings only apply within Acrobat, which rather defeats the point. The PDF format - alongside the other Photoshop standards such as TIFF, JPG and PSD - also supports metadata like captions and keywords embedded within the file. This information is now stored in XMP (extensible metadata platform) format, which, as a recognised standard, will enable easier file retrieval and management as well as allowing automatic workflows.

The most important file output capability is Photoshop's Web image optimisation, as here every byte counts. The Save for Web dialog offers a number of improvements, including the ability to output to the basic bilinear WBMP format for use in wireless Web pages. Much more advanced is Photoshop's ability to apply different GIF lossiness and JPEG quality settings to different areas of an image so that less important areas of an image are more highly compressed. In version 6, this involved creating an alpha channel mask, but version 7 now lets you automatically apply higher quality settings to text and vector shapes, which, by their nature, are likely to be the focus of attention.

The most welcome optimisation enhancement is the transparency handling for GIFs. In the past, you were expected to set up transparency before calling up the Save for Web dialog. Now you select colours from the colour table and mark them as transparent. Plus, as all settings are remembered, you can continue working non-destructively on the original. This approach is how most other applications already handle GIFs, but Photoshop 7 breaks new ground with its dithered transparencies. If you set up a partially transparent layer, Photoshop can mimic the effect with pattern, noise and diffusion-based dithers, which you can then set to be transparent. The resulting semi-transparent GIF will appear to blend with whatever background you place it over.

Photoshop has been crying out for years for visual image management and better brush handling, and version 7 does finally deliver. After waiting so long, it's a case of better-late-than-never, but, even if you've turned to dedicated alternatives such as CompuPic (version 6 reviewed issue 88, p177) and Corel Painter in the meantime, it's always better to have such power integrated into your main editor. Throw in some enhanced Web capabilities and the odd tweak, and Photoshop 7 should keep most users happy.

While it's a much smaller leap than that between 5.5 and 6, version 7 does do enough - just enough - to maintain Photoshop's lead over the competition.