What’s so special about Photoshop? I attended a conference on multi-platform multimedia at Boston Macworld Expo last year. There were panelists from many different companies who were professionally involved in producing multimedia packages for use on all computer platforms, from Amiga and Mac through IBM, Silicon Graphics, and Sun. There were two things we kept hearing. First, the vast majority of these productions are created on Macs and then ported to the other platforms. The producers — wisely — do not tell Sun, IBM, etc. that their fancy interactive sales presentations were created on a Macintosh and then “dumbed down” to the least common denominator.
The second item is related to the first. Most of the panelists agreed that one of the reasons for developing multimedia packages on the Mac is Photoshop. “There just isn’t anything like Photoshop on the other platforms” was one of the comments we heard.
That’s changing now, as versions of Photoshop are being offered on other platforms. It’s unlikely that the Mac will lose its head start in this area, however, especially considering the comment made by Hugh Chang, Microsoft’s manager for multimedia products, who said, “The Macintosh has been accepted by the creative community. That market isn’t very interesting to us.” Having Byte magazine name the Quadra as its choice for workstation doesn’t hurt either.
Be that as it may, Photoshop is the undisputed leader in the field of photo retouching and compositing, and a new version is cause for great interest throughout the entire world of computer graphics. Version 2.5 is not being touted as a major upgrade, but there are enough new features to warrant a close look.
Tools
The Tool palette is the first place you’ll notice the changes. The pen tool has disappeared (moved to a new place, actually) and the new tool which takes its place near the bottom is really two tools in one: Dodge and Burn. Anyone who has ever worked in a darkroom will feel right at home with these tools, which let you selectively darken or lighten areas of the image. Double-clicking on this tool lets you choose several options, including its response to pressure-sensitive graphics tablets such as those from Wacom.
The foreground/background color tool near the bottom of the tool palette has two new gadgets. The first lets you reverse the foreground and background colors, and the second returns you to the default black and white settings. These two “buttons” can save you many steps as compared to the previous version.
The final new addition to the tool palette is the QuickMask toggle. Clicking on the right-hand icon puts you into this mode, where selections appear as translucent masks (which look much like old Rubylith masks). This gives the user a clearer and more intuitive idea of where his mask is and how it will function. Additionally, while in the QuickMask mode, masks can be modified with any of the painting tools, even soft-edged ones. Rubylith could never do that! Clicking the other icon returns you to the normal mode, where the mask becomes a selection.
(Some of the other improvements to masking will be discussed later.)
Palettes Galore
Many functions which used to be available only through modal dialog boxes are now accessed by way of Photoshop’s numerous floating palettes, several of which seem to have been inspired by FreeHand’s palettes. For instance, the Brush palette gives instant access to a library of brushes in many different sizes and shapes. New brushes can be created, and sets of brushes can be saved and loaded. A pop-up menu lets you choose transfer modes, and a slider lets you adjust the transparency of the brush.
The Channels palette shows the available channels and allows you to make them visible, editable, or locked. Channels can now be individually named and colored, and multiple channels can be used at the same time. A new compression scheme makes files with extra channels much smaller than in previous versions.
The Paths palette is the new location for the Pen tool. Icons for the different Bezier functions are a welcome improvement over the awkward method used in earlier versions. It is now possible to create unclosed paths, which can be stroked with any of Photoshop’s painting tools. Also, the TIFF format can now incorporate clipping paths. (This feature was previously only available with the EPS format.)
The improved Colors palette allows you to mix colors, as well as being able to “pick up” and store as many as 256 colors to save for future use.
All of the palettes can be collapsed in order to take up less space on your monitor. Considering the number of useful new palettes, you’ll appreciate this feature. The positions of all palettes can be remembered between sessions.
For Variety’s Sake
The Variations function is an intuitive way to do basic color correction. A thumbnail version of the current picture is ringed by variations such as “more magenta,” “more cyan,” etc. This method provides functionality similar to EFI’s Cachet software. Once the settings have been determined, they can be saved and then loaded into other similar pictures, thus creating a kind of “batch” color correction capability. Both the Variations controls and the Info palette show “illegal” colors; colors which cannot be matched in the CMYK mode used by commercial printers.
There are several new filters; Extrude and Color Halftone provide highly abstract effects.
HSB and HSL modes are gone (and probably won’t be missed), but a new Lab color model has been added in order to take direct advantage of Photo CD files. The program can now open JPEG compressed files directly.
Performance
It’s clear that Adobe has been very sensitive to performance issues; Photoshop is a big program which has to do lots of heavy calculations. It should come as no surprise that the new version, with all of its new features, is even slower at some tasks. However, many of the filters have added preview windows, and the screen redraw has been improved by a tiling feature that can help when working on small areas of big pictures. Adobe has also rewritten code which will allow third parties to supply hardware accelerators that can hook into the program via plug-ins. We did not test this feature.
Adobe built in support for keyboard shortcuts for many commands, but limited the choices to the function keys on an extended keyboard. These are unlikely to be much help to the typical Mac user, who used up all of those keys long ago.
One disappointment is that there is no preview available in Open dialogs. Many programs have added this feature by now, and it’s surprising that Adobe has let this one go by.
The Upgrade
A CD-ROM version of Photoshop 2.5 is available only as an upgrade to previous users. This features a series of tips and techniques from experts such as Russell Brown and John Knoll. These sections are presented as talking head QuickTime movies, usually followed by a “show me” section. Some of these demonstrations really help to explain procedures, but some would be better as text in the manual. (Note: if you have an old and slow CD-ROM player, don’t even bother trying to view these movies; they come up garbled on SMUG’s old Denon machine.)
Also included on the CD upgrade version are a number of stock photographs and demo versions of other Adobe software. Adobe’s Type On Call CD-ROM is included, too, along with a number of free typefaces.
Conclusion
Photoshop 2.5 is sure to please previous users, and many of its new features will make it easy for beginning users to get started. It’s a solid upgrade.
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