Sometime in the spring, when the buds are on the trees and the birds are singing, we’ll have a brand new Adobe Creative Suite (CS) 3 to play with.
It’ll be a big complicated package with versions of InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, plus whatever plans Adobe has for the former Macromedia DreamWeaver and FireWorks web programmes.
That lot will be a bit hard to cover in a single Product of the Week, so we’re starting early with the important part that we know about already: Photoshop CS3, which has been available in Beta form for a couple of months.
It’s hard to imagine a pre-press or design company that doesn’t have Photoshop, which is the standard industry programme for image handling, including retouching and separations. The original version 1.0, first shipped in 1990 and the CS3 upgrade will be, in effect, version 10.0.
As you would expect, the Beta isn’t quite the real thing and Adobe is promising a few extra surprise features in the final release, but it’s a good indication of what we’re going to get.
One important clue is that the Beta expires on 1 May, so it’s a fair guess that CS3 will ship in late April. The website announces that this is ‘Photoshop CS3 Standard’, leading to online speculation that, like recent editions of Acrobat, there will be a Premium edition too, with extra features.
Free download
This is the first time Adobe has issued a public Beta for Photoshop that anyone can download (though you need a valid CS2 serial number otherwise it times out in two days). However, Adobe hasn’t issued documentation or updated help files, so finding some of the new features has to be a detective job.
Online training company lynda.com has helpfully released some free downloadable videos that take you through the key new features.
Photoshop CS3 will be available in Universal form for new Intel Macintoshes as well as earlier machines. Adobe hasn’t indicated whether it will support Windows Vista yet, but hopefully it will.
The Beta also includes a brand new version of the Bridge file viewing and organising utility, first seen with CS2. This can preview and open any Creative Suite file, as well as PDFs, JPEGs and TIFFs created elsewhere.
There’s a radical overhaul to the Bridge user interface, which now has three columns and bears a strong resemblance to Adobe’s new £125 Lightroom Raw image previewing and processing workflow for photographers. It’s highly configurable, with preview and data windows that can be dragged around and arranged however suits you. Data palettes can be overlapped with tabs. You can save different arrangements in up to three workspaces, which you click on for instant realignment.
You can now preview single or multiple images at large size on-screen, instead of just as groups of thumbnails. Images in a folder can be filtered so only those meeting your criteria (date, file type, keywords etc) will appear. Images can also be grouped into stacks with a single thumbnail so you can find them again (like with Apple Aperture).
A welcome new feature is a ‘loupe’ tool that lets you inspect a small area of any preview or thumbnail at 100% or even 200%, allowing you to judge sharpness without opening the file. Bridge can now be used with Acrobat Connect, Adobe’s collaborative instant messaging/document sharing tool, sold separately.
Camera converter
Bridge can also preview proprietary raw format files from most digital cameras and launch them straight into Photoshop’s ‘camera raw’ utility. This has emerged as one of the best converters and is effectively a separate programme. It’s been overhauled for CS3 and adopts some of the extensive control set developed for Lightroom.
There’s more control over highlights and shadows, including new sliders for quarter tones in the curves menu. The colour fringe reducers work better. Less usefully, the ability to leave some settings on auto while adjusting others manually has gone – it’s now all-auto or all-manual.
The main Photoshop CS3 has a revamped user interface. Different workspaces are provided, including printing and proofing, which mainly put colour highlights on relevant menu items. The most important change to the interface is the new docking palette for current tools, which goes on the right of the screen next to the main palette dock. Both the tool and palette docks can now be collapsed to small icons when not needed.
Probably the biggest new feature is non-destructive application of filters, which Photoshop users have requested for years. The process uses new ‘smart layers’, where you define any layer as smart, and then apply any number of filters within it. Filters are listed in the layer palette and can be individually modified, re-ordered or deleted later on, unlike conventional filters which are permanently applied. If you save the file (as PSD or TIFF), the smart layers are preserved and can be modified when the file is re-opened.
All well and good, but you can’t use editing brushes on a smart layer, so you can’t retouch after applying editable filters. You have to rasterise the filters (making them permanent) before the brushes work. Still, it’s a good attempt and very valuable for experimenting.
Cutout masking
Also very promising is the ‘quick selection’ tool, a sophisticated new brush that makes cut-out masking ridiculously easy, especially on objects with clearly defined edges. You simply paint it over the areas you want to cut out and it jumps to take in whole blocks of colour. Supplementary brushes add to or delete from the selection and you can vary the brush size to control sensitivity. You may need to fine-tune the mask but it can really speed up the bulk of the work.
Any selection can now be tweaked using the new ‘refine edges’ menu. This has sliders to control different aspects of the selection edges and to preview the results as cut-outs with black, white or transparent red masks.
The rather poor ‘photomerge’ tool from CS2, which would attempt to stitch overlapping images together to form a panorama, has been totally revamped. This one does the job much better because it can bend and warp images so they fit. It also gives you a choice of projections, such as cylindrical, perspective and manual alignment.
Photoshop’s new ‘automatically align layers’ control can warp two or more similar hand-held shots on top of each other, so they match as closely as possible. You can then erase any element you don’t want. This only works properly for images that are fairly close to start with.
Vanishing Point, the clever perspective cloning tool introduced in CS2, has been extended so that you can align several planes at any angle you want (previously they had to be 90°). You can paste images into the planes and they appear as pseudo-3D. This could be useful for packaging mock-ups.
Black and white conversion used to be fiddly, with the best tone control available through the non-intuitive ‘channel mixer’ menu. A new dedicated black and white menu is easier to understand and offers much more control.
The ‘curves’ menu has changed for the first time in years. It can now superimpose a histogram with end density sliders.
High resolution images can be formatted for viewing on web pages via the ‘zoomify’ export menu – creating a Flash file that allows viewers to zoom in and view the resolution and the section they need, so there’s no huge download wait.
Finally, the ‘print’ menu has been overhauled, so there’s one big menu combining a larger preview, printer choice, page set-up and colour management controls.
Taken together, Photoshop CS3, Bridge and Camera Raw are all major upgrades with valuable new features that will be worth paying for. Adobe hasn’t yet said how much upgrading from CS2 to CS3 will be, though past form suggests somewhere between £150 and £199.
SPECIFICATIONS
Platforms Mac OS X Binary, Windows
Price to be decided (likely to be £450, or £199 to upgrade)
Contact Adobe UK 020 8606 4001 www.adobe.com
THE ALTERNATIVES
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI
Popular with consumers because of its low price. There’s no Mac OS version. It has a built-in browser and all the usual brushes, filters, colour and density controls. It allows easy file swapping with Corel Painter, the excellent natural-media simulating art programme. But anyone who’s serious about pre-press will buy Photoshop.
Price £69
Platform Windows
Contact Corel UK 01628 589800 www.corel.com
ACD Canvas X
A long-established and very versatile graphical programme that combines layout, vector graphics and bitmap imaging. It’s popular with technical illustrators, partly because it can import near-enough any 3D file format. Picture editing is confined to global or selective effects (no pixel painting), but there’s a decent set of exposure adjustments, filters, resizing and envelope distortion tools, plus an autotracer.
Price £250
Platform Mac OS X, Windows
Contact ACD Systems 00 1 250 544 6700 www.acdsystems.com
