Adobe Photoshop 7.0 follows one of the best updates to the product in its venerable 12-year history. Version 6.0 answered many of the requests and complaints of the 4-million-strong professional customer base, so Adobe has begun to look elsewhere for new users. It's found them in the growing prosumer and amateur digital camera market. As it turns out, many of the new features aimed at this group also benefit the traditional professional Photoshop users.
The new features break down into a few major areas: workflow and interface, new brushes and painting tools, asset management features, and web design tools.
Workflow in version 7.0 is greatly aided by a new feature that gives users the ability create custom workspaces by selecting and docking frequently used palettes. For instance, when painting you might need only color swatches, brushes, and layers to be visible. Those tabs can be docked into a single palette that can be saved as a workspace while all the other, unnecessary tool palettes are hidden. This brings to mind an intelligent tab key that hides all tools. You can also customize your tools by creating special brushes or settings and saving them.
For the first time, Photoshop takes on the challenge of file management. I tend to create dozens of versions of a file then move on to some other project, only to return with very little recollection of how the files were organized. If that's you, too, then you'll appreciate the new File Browser. Now you can search for files visually, not just by a file name. The default view of the File Browser has four panes: a Tree view that navigates through the folders on various storage mediums, the Thumbnail view that displays selected images, the Preview pane that shows an enlarged version of the thumbnail, and lastly, the Metadata pane.
The Metadata pane includes information for any image such as date created and date modified. Even cooler is access to the EXIF data file that digital cameras create for each shot to save information such as image size, file size, focal length of the lens, f/stop, etc. Other handy tricks in the File Browser are a button that instantly rotates portraits to landscape format, plus the ability to batch-rename and rank images.
I expect to use the ranking tool a lot. If you have 30 portrait images, all versions of the same shot, you can rank the images numerically or alphabetically or using your own system. Photoshop automatically sorts the shots. This is extremely useful for anyone working with clients. The sorting function, another big win, lets the user sort by file name, file width and height, file size, file type, resolution, color profile, date created, date modified, and copyright. Additionally, rankings within the sort can be applied. Again, for professionals awash in old and new versions of files who need to revisit ongoing projects, this is a huge chaos eliminator.
While there are many web-centric tools in Photoshop 7.0, one feature in particular caught my attention. For me the Web Gallery feature is conceptually linked to the sorting and ranking tools. It provides an HTML-enabled template to let you show work online. The several templates include forward and back buttons for navigation through series of images that you just drop into your FTP site for viewing by collaborators or clients. There is even a security option to watermark your files with caption, file name, or copyright.
Artists tend to be very aware of the time it takes to create an image, but preparation for client proofs, putting images online, and other management tasks are often a sizable chunk of an afternoon. Photoshop aimed some of these efficiency features at the prosumer market, but they will be useful for professional artists as well. With that in mind, the Picture Package lets you more easily print multiple images on one page. Also, you can print to different page sizes and add labels and text for each image.
For at least five years, a common request has been better brushes. Studio Artist, Painter, Commotion, and other image-editing applications have all been more innovative with brush technology than Adobe. The new brush engine in Photoshop 7.0 answers many of the complaints and will probably go down in history as the main reason to get this upgrade. Compared with the brushes of Painter or Studio Artist, Photoshop's new brushes do not break new ground. They are, however, a substantial improvement over those of previous Photoshop versions.
The new brushes are very powerful, greatly extending Photoshop's basic approach to brushes. Wet and dry brushes grant control over several parameters, including shape, tilt, spacing, scatter, jitter, diameter, texture, and shading. New parameter settings can be saved as entirely new brushes. Brushes can also be combined. For this reason, brush preview windows are now shaped to accommodate the full stroke of a brush. All this is great, but Photoshop 7.0, while enjoying greatly enhanced brushes, is only state-of-the art for 1999. There is still plenty of room to set the standard.
Three other image-editing tools will be of interest to digital matte painters, retouch artists, and motion-graphic artists. First is the Pattern Maker. This tiling feature hides the repetitious pattern that usually plagues this type of texture generation. I've always wondered why no one tackled this problem before, and Photoshop 7.0's current implementation is straightforward and highly useful. Select an area of an image such as leaves or foliage, and this image source is tiled according to a user-defined grid. You can increase or decrease the images/size ratio and then apply the randomizer. Apply randomization over and over to create different repetition-free patterns. The randomization is consistent, so you can go back to a previous setting and recall a specific pattern. As is the case with any tiled or repeated texture, this works best on organic and rough textures.
Basically an enhancement to the Clone tool, the Healing brush is a very powerful application of several tools at once. Cloning, a mainstay of photo retouching, has limitations. For instance, while you can clone one part of a man's sport coat to a damaged part of his coat in another area of the image, the patch won't match unless the contrast and relative brightness are the same. The workaround is to apply the patch to a layer and then use the transfer modes, levels, and possibly even a grayscale ramp (on yet another layer) to hide the patch. The Healing brush does this all in one pass. While it's not infallible, I was able to clone areas much more easily in a variety of common situations. When it works it's wonderful — and frequently, it works.
The last really big image-editing enhancement is to Liquify, the distortion tool. It now features zoom, pan, and multiple undo. Undos are important because of the uncalibrated, improvised nature of painted distortions. You can also save the underlying distortion mesh for reuse with other images. This allows experimentation with low-resolution proxies for faster results. The saved mesh can then be applied to the full-res picture. There's also a new Turbulence brush that's good for creating fire and smoke.
I'm a bit disappointed that neither After Effects nor Photoshop 7.0 lets you manipulate the distortion by moving points on the mesh directly. This is really useful for matching one image to another. For instance, suppose you are doing a cartoon version of a packaged good or some other object that has been created in a 3D animation program. You have a scan of the real object that you'll use to repair an image of the more rounded, cartoon version created in Maya or 3ds max. Painting in distortions of this type with a brush does not provide sufficient control. What is needed is the ability to drag points on the mesh of the new image to match the underlying shape of the 3D image (essentially a morph). Variations on this type of problem are reasonably common.
As mentioned, many new enhancements for web designers make it so that images can be easily previewed for common web formats. There is also a new built-in spell checker that evaluates multiple languages in the same file. Support for the latest enhancements to OS X means improved memory management. XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) makes it easier to distribute content seamlessly to print, web, e-books, and motion formats.
This is a good upgrade for dedicated image editors, and a very good upgrade for digital artists who offer a range of services. Small and large design and print shops will want to take advantage of the file browsing feature, something that I expect will save me a great deal of time. The brush technology presents a gift-horse situation, insofar as the improvements in version 7.0, which would have been cause for celebration in 5.0, seem underwhelming in 2002.
As for the important need to integrate Photoshop and After Effects better, don't hold your breath. The Photoshop folks simply are not impressed with the motion graphics community — it comprises less then 10% of the customer base. Right now they're catering to desktop-publishing users, web designers, and the exploding digital camera market.
Fortunately, Photoshop was already an excellent product. It just got better for the motion graphics community — even if their needs are not Adobe's main concern.
