Photoshop 4

The changes to the interface then are very much a case of tinkering at the edges rather than a radical overhaul of the core. For the power user this makes no difference. To them, the use of the shortcut to fill a selection with the current colour while preserving areas of transparency is so commonplace as to seem ordained. For those beginning the learning curve, however, Photoshop 4 remains unnecessarily complex, and its lightweight interface overhaul is an opportunity missed.

One area of the interface that has improved is the control over the working view. In previous releases Photoshop was limited to preset zoom levels of 1:1, 2:1 and so on. Now it's possible to set any zoom level from 0.13 per cent up to 1,600 per cent. In practice this means that if you drag over any area with the Zoom tool, it will fill the current window area to the full. While this makes the most of available screen space, it does make the constant encroachment of the on-screen palettes even more irritating.

To change your position when working on a magnified section of a large image, it used to be necessary to either try some hit-or-miss panning or, more usually, to zoom out to see the full image and zoom in again onto the desired new section. With the new Navigator palette it's now possible to have a constant on-screen preview of your entire image with a rectangle outlining the visible area. Dragging the rectangle, or redrawing it, instantly changes the visible area to match. Again, working screen space is lost under the palette, but if you often work on the details of an image, the Navigator is an excellent aid. Ulead has a similar feature in PhotoImpact, which takes up less screen space, but isn't as flexible.

Equally helpful when working on large images is the new ability to add guides and grids. Previously, if you wanted elements of a picture to be aligned, you'd either have to do it by eye or use the Info palette to gather the necessary information on pixel positions. Now it's easy to set up a repeating grid or to drag guides down from the ruler. Once added, it's possible to hide temporarily or turn off the snap effect of guides and grid.

Getting Selected

One of the most fundamental tasks in Photoshop is making selections. It's in this area that a number of changes have been made. The cropping tool, for example, has been moved to be one of the suboptions for the marquee select tool and works slightly differently. The major advance is that the cropping box can now be rotated, which is particularly useful if you've scanned an image in at an angle. The downsides are that such a common tool is now only a suboption and on my display, and with the late beta under review, the cropping box is completely invisible against grayscale images .

More fundamental is the change to the handling of selections themselves. In the past, dragging within the selection moved the actual pixel data, now dragging simply moves the selection outline. To reposition the pixels, you now have to use the dedicated move tool. This new way of working will undoubtedly throw experienced users the first few times, but as they can instantly access the move tool by holding down , it's not going to affect productivity seriously. At least it shows that there's someone in Adobe thinking about usability.

Once a selection has been made it can be transformed in a number of ways. As in the past, the various commands to rotate, skew, add perspective and so on are available from the menus. Now, however, the final version of the selection isn't rendered until the user double-clicks within the selection, or presses which allows cumulative effects to be built up interactively. More importantly, as the intermediate stages aren't rendered, multiple degradations of the image are avoided and so the final quality is improved.