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Photoshop CS

It's a Big Deal Poweful New Features Aplenty

Adobe's category-leading image editing application Photoshop is now in version "CS," which may as well stand for "Can't Stop." What's nice about this latest release is that many of the new features are as useful to the power user as they are to the graphics professional. The bottom line? If there was ever a time to shell out $600 for a graphics editor (or $200 if you're upgrading from an earlier version), this may be it.

Photographic Specialties

If you're not a graphic artist, your main source of images is likely to be your digital camera. Photoshop is a dream for handling all these images and making them look even better than they did through your camera lens. Unless you're very agile with the settings of your digicam, you probably don't change your white balance or set your cam up for different lighting conditions. And even with the scarily intuitive programming in high-end cameras, it's still possible to make bad images.

Photoshop has added two powerful features that help users recover those shots that could have been great if only they had had enough time (and knowledge) to initially tweak the necessary settings.

The new Shadow/Highlight Adjustment feature is nearly magical in its function. Simply select the menu option and a preview of the program's best-guess fix appears. In our testing, Photoshop's first guess was as good as we could make the exposure even after fiddling with the manual changes. It took our underexposed subject and overexposed background and brought the detail out in each, saving our otherwise obviously amateurish photos.

The other saving grace is a little more technical and requires the use of a relatively new digital camera that saves its images in the Camera RAW format. This format is pretty much exactly what it sounds like the raw data collected from the image sensor before the camera has performed any kind of processing.

Of immediate interest to us are those shots we took indoors without a flash that almost always look way too orange. Using the RAW image data we were able to apply the indoor color balance setting that we forgot to set before taking the picture and make the shot look like it was taken with the proper color balance. And because the adjustments were made in the raw format, we didn't lose any detail in the image.

The Light Box

Photoshop CS's bag of goodies extends far beyond just tweaking you digital camera pictures to get the best natural look. The graphic app's enhanced image browser is a dream to use. It's an updated version of the visual browser that's now called the light box. You can view high quality thumbnails in pretty much whatever size you like, select the images you want to work on, and modify the document information that's carried within each file. This means you can add keywords, descriptions, and any other information you think might be helpful in finding or categorizing your images, and then searching or sorting your images based on that data.

Automated Functions

There's a whole new set of scripts that are immediately useful. Select the Web Album function and Photoshop will create thumbnails and let you select from a variety of Web page designs. One format will even let you collect feedback on each image very useful for submitting work to a customer. Other scripts will create "photo packages" like those offered by pro photographers with several different size images of the same picture on a single sheet. And you can pick from a variety of slide shows, including a PDF slide show that's suitable for distributing via email or downloading.

Pulling Double-Duty

Another major change in the CS release is that ImageReady CS is now fully integrated with Photoshop CS. Previously ImageReady functioned as a completely separate entity, and while you could kick it off from within Photoshop, the image you were working on stayed open in Photoshop and had to be updated when you were done working with it in ImageReady. While certainly not the end of the world, interaction between the two programs was all too often messy and inconvenient.

If you work with graphical Web pages, ImageReady's new features can help speed page development. Aside from the normal image optimization functions that make JPGs, GIFs, and other Web graphics load as quickly and painlessly as possible, creating rollovers and manipulating image sections is made simple by new functions that help you align image elements, assign attributes to individual slices, and import comma delimited data to control what displays on various mouse actions.

ImageReady can also create Flash images directly from your image selections. This makes putting interactive content on pages simple. I created what Adobe calls remote rollovers so that floating a cursor over one item causes an action to happen in a different segment of the page. For instance, floating over the "Contact Us" button on the left side of the page causes the company's contact information to appear in a box on the right side of the page.

One Small Caveat...

One word of caution for those digital photographers who intend to use the 16-bit raw format capability; you may experience some limitations when using these kinds of files. While the program does indeed import the raw format, you'll notice that several of Photoshop's filters become unavailable. In addition, many third-party plug-ins don't work on these files. Check with the vendor of any plug-ins you rely on to see if you'll be able to use them on 16-bit files. When we opened the pictures as 8-bit files everything worked as normal.

We also noticed that when working with 16-bit files, every time we applied an adjustment such as 'curves' or 'contrast,' the dynamic range of the file (based on watching the histogram) degraded. When we tried the same operation on an 8-bit fill, however, the histogram retained the original dynamic range.

Even with the caveat about 16-bit images, Photoshop CS is a joy to use, and its latest enhancements address some aspects of using the program that kept all but the dedicated professionals from loving it.

Added: May 29th 2005 Reviewer: Scott Koegler

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