Adobe Photoshop CS

The crown jewel of all the Adobe applications is the photo editor's tool-of-choice, Photoshop. As such, the new Photoshop is the most important component of the new Creative Suite. The good news stemming from this is that Adobe is offering a bargain upgrade to the full suite for all existing Photoshop users. The bad news is that the program now only runs under Windows 2000 and XP (or Mac OS X) and implements a product activation scheme - though at least this does allow for non-synchronous use on two systems.

When the program first loads, apart from the new Welcome Screen with its access to content, tutorials and the crucial colour management settings, there's relatively little that's obviously new. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that you can now finally customize your keyboard shortcuts, but that otherwise the working environment is very familiar. However, don't let this fool you into thinking that this is a minor upgrade.

The way you get your images into Photoshop is the first major change. Version 7 introduced the File Browser palette, which lets you view thumbnails of your graphic files, but it was a relatively crude affair. Now you can adjust the interface and the size of thumbnails, view vector files such as PDF and store favourite directories for easy access. You can also temporarily flag those files that you are interested in, hide all others, and then drag the thumbnails into any order just as you would on a lightbox. Best of all, you can now perform actions such as rotation and batch commands to multiple selected files without having to open them first (though disappointingly JPEG rotation isn't lossless).

The improved file management isn't just visual. Photoshop, like all the CS apps, supports the new XMP standard for the storing of text-based metadata. What this means in practice is that, using the File Browser's new Keywords pane or the revamped File Info dialog, you can quickly specify and apply keywords to your images. You can then search, sort and organize your images based on the embedded data. There's also an option to automatically store a text record of a file's editing history as metadata if you need to keep track of what's been done to it. This is all well and good, but we'd much prefer the File Browser to be floated off as a standalone utility.

If you're scanning your images, the new Crop and Straighten command will save a lot of time as it allows you to scan more than one image at a time with each automatically straightened, cropped and copied to its own document. If you're producing work for video, Photoshop's reworked New Document dialog provides the most common video sizes as presets complete with automatic Action-safe and Title-safe guides. More importantly, Photoshop CS now supports the non-square pixels of video images. Thankfully, it also offers Pixel Aspect Ratio Correction as a new display option so that your images will still appear in the correct proportions within Photoshop just as they do on the external video monitor.

Professional photographers using high-end digital cameras are also well-catered for. Photoshop CS now includes the previously separate Camera Raw plug-in which allows direct manipulation of the raw image data exactly as captured by the camera. This means that you have complete control over factors such as white balance, exposure and contrast along with new tabs for controlling lens and calibration adjustment. You can also now apply Camera Raw settings to multiple images from the File Browser.