Motivation: Review of the latest version of this artistic expression powerhouse tool
Street price: $560US    Rating: 8.7 on 10
Software: Adobe Photoshop CS

Adobe Photoshop earns its position as the number one paint program for three reasons. First, PhotoShop is cross platform - supporting the two most popular desktops - MacIntosh and Windows. Second, Photoshop often takes on some of the toughest problems in graphics and digital photo editing and solves them first and/or more comprehensively than any other vendor. Take Color management (helping to match the different color gamuts of the many different color devices such as a display, scanner, printer etc). Photoshop was the pioneer and continues to set the standard. Also consider layering (allowing an artist to paint on successively higher layers and then control the transparency and interactions between the layers). Photoshop was not the leader but has added a whole series of innovations such as layer masks, custom blending, support for hundreds of layers, and now conditional layer comps in the new Photoshop CS. Quite simply, Photoshop tends to out-innovate its competitors.

But not always. And that is the third strength of Adobe Photoshop. They respond to the competition and learn from them. Example, Corel PhotoPaint for at least three versions had consistently better and easier to use masking tools. Photoshop had the benefit of 3rd party plugins that shored up its weaker masking tools. But starting with Photoshop 5.0's smarter Magnetic masking, Adobe steadily improved its masking tools until it added the coup de grace - the Quick Mask Mode toggle switch. This switch turns all of Adobes brushes and drawing tools into masking tools - every correction and drawing effect is rendered not on the visible drawing layer but on the underlying mask layer - very powerful.

Another example is the built-in image browser mode as shown in the screenshot above. The browser shows thumbnails of all the images in a folder or directory. Jasc's Paint Shop Pro was the lone graphics program to support such a browser until Adobe finally added one in Photoshop 6.5. The Adobe browser was much slower than Jasc's, had less functionality, but did add two features not available in Jasc's browser. First, each thumbnail was highlighted in a larger preview thumbnail and the EXIF exposure data associated with the image if available was displayed just below the preview. Since then Photoshop, has steadily improved its image browser making it a lot faster (but still slower than Jasc's) but more importantly adding ever more functions and features. Now the image browser has its own small little menu line -> File  Edit  Automate  Sort  View, each with about a half dozen commands underneath. For Photoshop, the browser has become the command Centrex whenever multiple image tasks have to be performed. Result - Photoshop now steps ahead of Jasc in browser features and in a unique way.

A third example is scripting. Adobe has had from its early versions the Actions capability - think of actions as Photoshop's simple macros. Actions record all the info associated with each action or Photoshop command executed by the user. These actions then can be edited including merging together other Actions, saved and then used over again to modify a completely different image. Not as powerful as Microsoft Excel's spreadsheet macros but a definite time saver. Corel PhotoPaint then responded by implementing a complete scripting language, CorelScript (it looks much like Microsoft's VBScript)that could not only record all the commands but allowed users to program the scripts - test the status of the image and do if-then logic, even complete loops to repeat the same operations over a group of image files (like cropping and then adding a ©Logo). Adobe quickly followed by implementing Microsoft's VBA-Visual Basic for Applications as its super scripting language. Corel followed and did the same replacing CorelScript with VBA.

Now Adobe has taken a longer view of scripting. It recognizes the importance of a scripting tool as a means of allowing savvy users and 3rd party tool makers to extend the capabilities of Photoshop in very novel ways. For example, automated creation of catalogs is one such application. But Adobe needs a cross platform scripting language since VBA does not run on the Mac or a possible new target platform, Linux. So Adobe has added JavaScript as its scripting language because it does reach Linux, Mac, Windows and a number of other platforms. Users are encouraged to try the File | Script | Browse command and the go to the Program File/Adobe/Photoshop CS/Scripting Guide/Sample Scripts/JavaScripts directory and try some of the two dozen simple to complex scripts available there. This is the future of the whole line of Adobe products as JavaScript has become the macro and extension language for Illustrator, GoLive, Atmosphere, etc.

So Adobe takes the long view and is relentless in improving its products, including complimenting its competitors by copying and improving on their best features. With that in mind lets take a look at some of the new features to be found in Photoshop CS.

What's New in Photoshop CS

Adobe itself clusters Photoshop's features around topic areas - what's new for graphic designers, web developers, photographers, video filmmakers and all users. Lets follow the same order. For graphic designers Photoshop CS provides a number of improvements including the ability to handle huge image sizes upto 360,000 by 360,000 pixels with 56 channels and an unlimited number of layers. Another new feature, Layer Comps are a convenience for photo finishers. Layer comps allow a user to label the stack of layers with different names. Big deal ?! Yes, if each of those layer comps also remember which layers are visible and which are not. This allows a photo finisher or designer to show many different design options at a single mouse click by making some layers visible and some not by clicking on one layer comp from a list. Very nifty for design reviews.

My own personal favorite is the new Text-to-Path feature shown in the screenshot just above. Its dead simple to use. Select any of the four Text tools and then make sure they hover above a shapes edge or path. The cursor changes to an I-bar with a wiggle path through it. Then just type. To change the position or above/below the path of the text switch to either the Direct Selection or the Path Selection tools and then just select and drag the text appropriately. Its that simple.

New for Photographers

As befits its name, Photoshop CS has a lot of new features for photographers. The new Filter Gallery is by far the best because it shores up a Photoshop weakness yet produces an elegant solution. The problem is that until the Filter gallery Photoshop used had to plow through a Filter menu with dozens of choices of effects or filters to use grouped into 13 sub menus. problem - recalling what each one of those filters would do ? second problem, the preview facility for each of filters is a tiny thumbnail while competitors have bigger before and after displays of the filters effects. Photoshop's solution - the Filter Gallery shown on the left.
The Filter Gallery solves the preview problem by making the preview area (see the left pane in the screenshot above)much larger than before although it still does not have a before and after comparison feature. In the middle pane users can see little thumbnails of what each filter will do. In the upper part of the righthand portion of the Filter Gallery are all the controls needed to change or fine tune the selected filter/effect. Finally in the lower portion of the righthand pane is the bit of Photoshop innovation magic. Users can stack up layers of effects. We stacked the Film Grain and Crosshatch filters. The layers of effects work very much like the main Photoshop Layer dialog. Click on the eye icon and that effect is temporarily made invisible. Drag it down and the order of the effects is changed - and boy does that make a difference. Click on the tiny trashcan icon and an effect is deleted from use. The little leafed page icon to the left of the trashcan inserts a new layer onto the effects stack. Voila- you have a filter effects system superior to anything else on the Paint market - and you have taken a Photoshop weakness and made it a strength in one version change. Another drawback - as of now the Filter Gallery only works with Photoshop's built-in filters; none of the hundreds of 3rd party Adobe plugin filters and effects work in the new Filter Gallery.

The next set of new photo features come in twos. First there is better ability to work with digital camera's raw file plus new full support for 16 bit pixel processing. Next there is the new lens blur effect - this allows the user to selectively blur the foreground or background of an image while the new custom Photo Filters approximate 20 of a photographers most familiar filters.

In colors, the improvements have been doubled to four. The new Match Color command is absolutely wonderful for arriving at a consistent Hue-Saturation-Lightness set for a group of images. Using a source image one imports the HSL levels to a target - giving a consistent color look and feel(HSL histogram profile) to the two images. The new Histogram palette helps in many manual color corrections because users can see the before and after histogram shifts for a color correction - it tells you "yep, you are putting in too much of a red hue cast", etc. The third color improvement. the new Image | Adjustment | Highlight/Shadow command will be a boon for digital camera users. In many outdoor shots the shadow areas are too dark relative to sky or other natural highlights. This command adjusts the highlights or just the shadows as if the photographer had a massive fill flash - images literally pop out of the shadows. See the screenshot at the left - sky retains is gray troubling tones; but foreground trees and lake - lost in shadow areas have been brightened up by using the Shadow/Highlight command. Also note the Histogram palette indicates the shift due to the pending color changes. The fourth new color tool is Color Replacement tool - which unlike other brushes only changes the hue not the saturation and lightness values already on the image. This makes the color replacement tool a much smarter "color" paintbrush. In sum these are 4 substantial new color features along with the other photographic improvements.

New for Filmmakers and Video Artists

Photoshop is becoming more video and film format aware. Nowhere is this seen better than in the ability to export with appropriate pixel aspect-ratio corrections for NTSC, PAL and HDTV. In addition, there are new video document presets with automatic guides which considerably simplifies going to and from video and film formats. And Image Ready, Photoshop's free companion program is loaded with new and improved features.

Now that Adobe's animation program, Live Motion, has been discontinued - Image Ready appears to be picking up some of the slack. For example, Image Ready has the ability to export Photoshop layers as files. More importantly for film and video makers Image Ready can export layers to the Flash SWF format. This gives Flash animators more control for staged effects by adding and removing layers as swf files, In addition, Image Ready has streamlined the Animation palette making Tweening and editing of animation frames easier. Also viewing animations appears to have a quicker response time. This is a beginning but still modest replacement for Live Motion as Adobe puts more emphasis on its new Adobe Video Collection suite of products.

New for Web Developers

The Image Ready interface has been enhanced to make selection and grouping of of objects easier. This includes the improvements to the Animation palette noted above plus many other UI improvements. In addition the new Web Content palette consolidates and simplifies creation and updating/modifying rollovers, menus and other Web artifacts. Now there is one palette to go to to control all the graphics UI elements in Image Ready.

In addition, Image Ready has coding enhancements with new controls for nested tables, XHTML, and other coding elements. The HTML code is cleaner and simpler and interfaces with Adobe GoLive web development program more efficiently. Perhaps one of the niftiest add ons is the new templates for using data driven graphics - the parameters passed to these routines determine what image is displayed, where, and in what format. This is certainly not SVG - with its detailed image control plus drawing capabilities but it does give DHTML developers more facilities and features to work graphics effectively into their websites.

New Tools for All Users

Again the improvements come in twos. For utilizes there is a new set of keyboard shortcuts. Just like being able to create workspace layouts, now keyboard shortcuts can be configured and saved. And the new Edit History Log features allows users to set more options in the Preferences dialogs for retaining metadata and other info in the history logs.

Besides the new Image Ready SWF Flash file output, Photoshop has two new output formats - Slideshows to PDF files and enhanced and additional templates for creating Web photo galleries. Both are welcome output improvements and are part of the new Image Browser's Automate command (they are also accessible through the main menu File | Automate command). But when accessed through the Image Browser Automate menu - then the current selection of files in the Image Browser is used initially to fill the list of images to be used in creating a PDF slideshow. The PDF slide show can have transition effects and user set timing between images changes.

The new options for the Web gallery templates are more conveniently accessed and the system of creating Web Galleries is smoothed. But what is striking is the wealth of commands available in Photoshop for delivering images as output in customizable ways. Users now have the choice of 1)PDF sideshows, 2)enhanced Web Galleries, 3)Contact Sheets with many layout options, 4)a print picture package with multiple options (see the screen shot at the left), 5)online service bureau automatic upload for printing, and 6)Panorama Picture merge option with very clever automatic picture fitting for merge (but user control over final positioning and cropping). This is a formidable list of automated output options that few if any Paint programs can match for the options and customization details provided by Photoshop. And Adobe continues to dominate the high quality, color fidelity supporting more color models and providing more color profile options.

So if readers get the impression that Photoshop continues to cater to the professional user that is a sound observation. Photoshop CS has two new features that graphics pros will like. First, as noted at the outset there is expanded scripting capabilities with the JavaScript interpreter able to support more Photoshop features natively. This including new knowledge of the Image Browser selected images lists. This in turn allows pros to create their own multi-image processing functions similar to the Contact Sheet or Picture Packager. The second pro enhancement is that Photoshop CS has opened up the spec on how to create Help How To's. This will be of definite interest to big shops which have specialized graphics processing need and want to extend the basic Photoshop help system.

Summary

If we examine the new features and compare them to the portfolio of features that Photoshop has there have been some impressive additions. Photoshop continues to dominate the high end of bitmap image and photo processing because of its strengths in 4 areas:

1)Color management and processing options. Photoshop CS added very useful Histogram palette, Shadow/Highlight and Color Replacement commands and tools.
2)Superior input and output features. Photoshop CS organized around Image Browser all its multi-file output tasks and added new PDF Slideshow and Web gallery templates while improving in other areas (SWF options, layer output).
3)Most innovative set of layering options. Yet another smart improvement with Layer Comps and the layering capabilities built into the Filter Gallery - vast improvement on a weak area in Photoshop.
4)Ability to push image processing stet of the art. The new capacity for being able to handle giant sized canvases with multiple channels and nearly infinite layers addresses the tough issue of size scalability. Behind the scenes Adobe is working to take advantage of new Intel CPU threading features and Mac graphics optimizations. Also the new JavaScript scripting capability makes Photoshop highly not extensible but also integrateable with database and Web Services processing.

So the best got better in features and hence the very high rating for PhotoShop CS. It would have been higher by 0.5 if not for three sticky wickets. For the first time, I had reliability problems with the program in Windows. PhotoShop CS crashed four times during over 30 hours of testing. At first I thought it was huge overload of large programs in memory on my system - Photoshop, Dreamweaver, 6 Firefox browser windows, Star Office Word, etc. So I cutout everything but Dreamweaver where I am writing this review. Yikes - it crashed again. So now I rebooted, and only ran Photoshop CS. 3 hours later, to my dismay, Photoshop CS crashed again. Unfortunately, it bombed on different operations - the only common thread was heavy use of the Brush Creator, Filter Browser, and Actions. So suddenly as Corel Painter IX gets born-again stability religion - Photoshop CS has an infrequent but notable case of the dropsies.

Second and perhaps stickiest because it is a completely preventable shortcoming. I can copy to the clipboard huge multi-megabyte files from any other program. But images from Photoshop that are bigger than 1MB are told:
"Adobe Photoshop Clip Image is too big to be exported"
This is, in the quaint expression of my dear old aunt, "a piece of ship logic". Because I copy to the clipboard huge images and then repaste them back into another Photoshop image with no problems whatsoever. Yes, I know the simple work around is to run an Action which 1)collapses/merges all the layers; 2)saves the image to a temporary file; 3)then goto the other program; 4)read in the temporary image file; and 5)then copy the image and paste it where you wanted to be in the first place. But that is 5 time consuming steps for an operation that should take only one.

Third shortcoming, I can point to the Corel PhotoPaint, Jasc Paint Shop Pro, or ULead Photo Impact plugins and use them in Photoshop with one major shortfall - they don't work in the new Filter Browser. Just Adobe-built plugins are apparently allowed. Now one of the attractions of the Photoshop product has been the very large 3rd party plugin market that has built up around Photoshop. Many are geared exclusively to work with Photoshop. As a thank you to all their third party ISV supporters, Adobe appears to be cutting them out of the Filter Browser spoils.

However, to add isnult to injury, Adobe does not allow its plugins to work in any other Paint program.Trying to do the reverse - use an Adobe Photoshop plugin with Jasc or Corel Paint programs simply gets cutoff by Adobe - the plugin refuses to work even though most other 3rd party plugins do function properly. Now, this is the kind of narrow-minded, lack of interoperability and respect for other programs that has gotten Microsoft such a nasty reputation for arrogance and disregard for customers needs to work with a range of programs to get the tasks done. Unfortunately, this is a continuing bad PR practice for Adobe because these three problems have persisted through at least two versions of Photoshop. So we deduct 0.5 ratings points from Photoshop CS for the ill inconsideration it is showing to its "partners", clients and customers. And Adobe can not afford to create ill-will towards its product because as a value proposition, Paint Shop Pro is improving relentlessly as well - and with its new Art Media layers and brushes its taking photofinishing and its users to new outstanding ratings.