Adobe Photoshop 7.0

www.adobe.com

Maureen Shannon, NJPCUG

Have you looked at Adobe Photoshop lately? If not, you are missing the best version of Photoshop yet. Version 6 brought big changes to Photoshop and was wonderful. It became more user friendly and much easier to work with while retaining all of the power devout users demand. This version has added more features and one you must not miss if you have been considering making the change and moving up to Photoshop.

I think a good point to make early on is that Adobe’s products are very well supported. I have run into two minor problems both of which were resolved in a matter of minutes. Once two years ago, I spoke to a technician who understood and corrected my problem in less than 5 minutes and the second time (several months ago) I used the knowledge base. It found the exact error message and I was up and running in another very few minutes. There was no time wasted searching over and over for solutions to my problem. Their knowledge base found it immediately and had the exact fix I needed. If you have every spent long periods of time searching for answers to a problem on another company’s web site, you can appreciate both the lack of problems with Adobe products and the ease of finding a solution if you do run into one. This is an important consideration. I have another product, once one of my favorites, that has been plagued with problems in its last few releases that never seem to be resolved. Photoshop as well as other products from Adobe, have all worked for me with the first release. Product stability is another very important factor to consider when choosing an image editing product.

Photoshop is renowned for its power and its tools. In the past, I didn’t find it all that easy to understand or work with. Now with the changes and improvements, I find it much easier to work with and really enjoy trying all the techniques and design ideas. Tool and palette selections are easily accessible in the workspace. You can change or view settings at a glance.  The menu features allows the user to pick and chose what they want and how they want to customize their workspace. The Preference settings offer further customization choices and selections.

It would be impossible to cover all the tools and features with the limitations on space and without making the review much to long. Each tool is easily recognizable on the tool bar and the additional selections are available by holding the mouse cursor over the corner of the flyout menu. Tools with multiple selections have a small black triangle in the lower right corner of their button.

State-of-the-art tools include: the new File Browser feature – you can view thumbnails of your images with file information such as size and the date it was modified; Layers – layers can be locked to be protected for accidental changes, moved around, linked in groups, hidden, and the palette enables you to apply effects instantly and edit them; the History Palette allows you undo and redo multiple steps or you can store snapshot of the image (a copy) in the palette and then continue making changes and editing the image – if you don’t like the changes you can return to the snapshot; Workspace – the workspace is customizable – you can personalize it, create specific workspaces for tasks; Options Bar – access to tool settings; Image Editing features include: Color Corrections tools; the new Healing Brush – unlike cloning the Healing Brush uses the texture, lighting and shading of the image to repair scratches, marks, and other damage; Selections Tools – marquees, pen tool, magic wand; Masking tools; Sharpening; Edge Smoothing; create contact sheets. Tools for painting – variety of effects such as charcoal, pastel, dry brush effects, and more. Brushes have presets and you can create custom settings too. The painting tools are another way to enhance and experiments with a wide variety of options when working with images. Other tools include: Drawing tools, color effects, layer effects, filters – over 95 filters included and you can add more with many Photoshop compatible filters that are available; transformation tools; optimization tools (ImageReady – which comes with the Photoshop package); transparency tools; slicing; rollover palette, typographic control – editable text, formatting, a spell checker, convert the text to shapes (as an earlier review where I created text in the shape of a fish); and much more. The tools are extensive and the abilities are incredible. The more techniques and tutorials you work with; the more you will appreciate the power of Photoshop.

This is an example of one of the brushes. It paints the rose on the filled background using the underlying background color. On the left, the rose looks like a shaded flower. The one on the right looks more like a cameo.

Some of the new features that are excellent are the browser feature which allows you to view any image on your system by browsing the folders and locations that they are stored in and view the image information that is available. The Healing Brush is another new tool that I like very much. I was able to repair and old photo with the Healing Brush and give it a realistic look that I could not do with a clone tool or with other repair tools. It samples and area and then applies that information to the damaged section. It worked quite well for me. The Patch Brush which is related to the Healing Brush lets you do even more precise work with the image. (Example below – from Adobe’s documentation) You can see all of the fine wrinkles around the eye are gone in the second photo.

Version 6 brought more text control flexibility and enhanced what could be done with text. This continues in Photoshop 7.

Along with the Browser and Healing Brush, other new features in Photoshop 7 include: enhanced web features – you can make areas transparent by taking out colors, create and manage rollovers; wet and dry brushes with adjustable settings create effects that look like painting techniques. I used a dry media brush with a soft light to brighten the example shown here (below). The first image is the original and the second image shows how much brighter and more vivid the colors became after going over it with the brush. The rainbow went from dull to beautiful.

The Pattern Maker plug-in lets you create background patterns by selecting a section of an image and then generating the pattern. The image shown here was the one created with an artistic brush (example below) and I sampled a section and used the pattern maker to create this image. The Liquify plug-in lets you distort images. I took an image created with the artistic brush and used the liquify plug-in to make it into swirls of color. See the images below.

A new color correction features brings more power to the already powerful color correction tools. The Auto Color Command brings truer color correction to images. (Adobe example below) This image from an Adobe PDF shows exactly how this feature works. The first image has a yellowish cast. The second image was corrected with auto levels command, and the last one with the new Auto Color Command feature. The last picture is “picture perfect”!

Photohop 7 has security features added to it; another new benefit to protect your work. You can now password protect the access to your images. A new built in spell-checker lets you search and replace text, works in multiple languages, on a single text layer or across all text layers. Picture Package helps you print multiple pictures on a page. There are also many other printing enhancements with the package.

Photoshop is cross-platform compatible. It also allows the user to add annotations to the file. It also has an audio annotation tool to record voice comments. It also has precision color management and has color options for the various types of images created (for print or the web). Photoshop also has tight integration with the latest releases of other Adobe products such as Illustrator, InDesign, LiveMotion, Acrobat, and others.

Creative support is important too. Photoshop has more books written about it than any other application I have worked with. And I work with many applications! I have more image applications installed on my computer than you would think possible and I use them to do a variety of tasks. Once Photoshop was something I turned to occasionally, now with all the improvements, enhancements, and new features, I use it more and more and love it. The best way to learn about an application is to take advantage of the books written on the subject. To properly learn Photoshop start with Adobe’s Photoshop 7 Classroom in a book. It teaches you all the basics and new features and tests your knowledge at the end of the chapters. You can learn and your own pace. Or get the book for the version you are using. The Classroom in a Book series will start you off with the knowledge you need to work with Photoshop efficiently (or other Adobe products). From there a visit to PeachPit Press’s web site and New Riders web site for Photoshop books and you will find everything you need to become proficient at using Photoshop and you will also find a wealth of design tutorials and creative inspiration in these books. From beginner to expert, there is a title that will show you all the secrets and power that is contained in Photoshop. I have several of these books and they are wonderful.

Enlarged view of the Tools.