Product Reviews

With more features crammed into each release of Photoshop, Adobe has finally drawn the line and split it into two versions: Photoshop Extended gains industry-specific tools such as 3D editing, 32-bit high dynamic range (HDR) imaging and scientific and medical measurement and analysis. Only Premium editions of CS3 include Photoshop Extended. This doesn't seem like a good thing; the division of features is arbitrary, and it would be a pity to see a great do-it-all application broken up for discrete target markets.

The new interface streamlines the familiar two-column toolbox into a single strip (you can put it back if you prefer). On the right, a neat column of palettes does away with the Palette Well but gains an extra strip of icons clinging to its left side, which expands into a second rank of panels. It's all customisable, but will take a bit of getting used to.

New to the toolbox is Quick Selection, yet another way to cut out an object from its background. Click anywhere and the 'dancing dots' pick out a surrounding area of similar colour; drag and the area expands. It's no miracle cure for difficult cutouts, but makes easy-to-moderate ones a lot faster. All cutouts can be adjusted in the Refine Edge dialog, which usefully brings together existing ways

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to modify a selection - expanding or contracting, blurring or sharpening the edge - in one place with a live preview.

Photoshop's Adjustment Layers apply tweaks, such as Levels or Hue/Saturation, non-destructively, without changing the image pixels. Why not apply filters, such as Gaussian Blur or Ripple, in a similar way? CS3 sort of achieves this using an existing type of layer called a Smart Object. When you apply a filter to a Smart Object, CS3 creates a Smart Filter, which is an editable property of the layer. You can also apply a Smart Filter to an ordinary layer, but only if you first convert the layer to a Smart Object, which then prevents you accessing its existing properties, such as a mask or Layer Style, except by double-clicking to open it as a separate document. This is really too cumbersome.

There are welcome improvements to the Clone tool, which 'paints' one part of an image over another. The Clone Source panel lets you switch between five clone sources, rotate the source content, and display a ghost image of the source. Some tasks previously addressed by cloning can now be tackled with Auto Align, which lines up a stack of shots of the same scene so you can mask the areas of one you want to replace with another, such as a person blinking in a group photo.

Raw image processing has been speeded up and you can import JPEG and TIFF images via the Camera Raw plug-in, so non-DSLR users needn't feel left out. If you're into 3D, engineering, manufacturing or medicine, check out the new Extended features at www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshopextended.

Photoshop CS3 is still by far the best software of its kind, and has some interesting new features. But for an upgrade that was so long in the making, it isn't a blockbuster.