Adobe Photoshop CS

The latest version of Adobe Photoshop would ordinarily be called version 8, except that it is now part of a comprehensive initiative called Adobe Creative Suite. Creative Suite Premium includes Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, GoLive, Version Cue, and Acrobat 6.0 Professional. The Creative Suite concept aims for tighter integration among the applications, including a common release date for new versions of the individual applications.

New versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, Version Cue, and Acrobat 6.0 comprise Adobe's Creative Suite.

Photoshop has been improving for such a long time that you might think by now they'd be running low on really big innovations. As it turns out, new digital technologies like digital cameras are revolutionizing image making, so much of what is interesting in PS CS are the tools for working with digital photography. There are also new workflow/GUI enhancements and a few features aimed at filmmakers and users of After Effects. All this adds up to a very satisfying new version with important high points.

One overall system development that qualifies as a high point is the continued move to support 16-bit operations and output. The new areas that have been converted to 16-bit are Paint(brushes), Layers, Text, and Shapes. The migration from 8 bit to 16 bit in both Photoshop and After Effects is close to complete.

Integration, of course, is the main strategy behind the Creative Suite. In addition to Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, GoLive, and Acrobat Professional, you will notice a new product called Version Cue. This is a data management application that helps users track changes to images in a project. Generally, version tracking is most useful in multi-user environments, but I can see using this for projects that span many months, when even a single user has trouble keeping track of files.

Another major change for users is that Photoshop only works with OS X 10.2 Jaguar or later. You might interpret this as another shot fired across Apple's bow by Adobe owing to the competition between Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro. Adobe is only doing what Apple does: FCP 4 and the DVD Studio Pro are only available for OS X.

Photoshop's image browser was added in version 7 a feature that was long overdue. The revised browser in CS builds on the basic function of the first version. The speed is improved, and I found that even very large folders opened in a second on my G5.

The browser is no longer found in the palette well at the top of the screen, but can be accessed in the File or Window menus. I like that the CS Browser window has been redesigned with all tools and functions located at the top of the window.

Two new features in the browser are the Search function and the Keyword option. The Search palette is a standard keyword locator with additional criteria including File Type, File Name, and Photoshop specific categories, such as Keywords, Rank, Flags, and Metadata.

The latest version of Photoshop, available in the Creative Suite package, has two new browser functions: Search and Keyword.

In addition to the Search function, the browser now has ways to sort images and group them together. For instance, you can attach a keyword to any image or group of images. This saves creating lots of extra folders and sub-folders on your hard drive or duplicating images. For temporary sorting, you can use the Flag command, which isolates images or groups of images. In a sense, this is a way to pre-sort files. You can restrict browser searches to flagged files, which is great when you are dealing with lots of files. A Show pop-up menu lets you hide unflagged images. Flagging is great for making a first sorting pass since the flags disappear when the program is closed.

For those of us with spatial memories, the new file browser also sports a Digital Lightbox, essentially allowing direct reordering of images in the browser screen. Just drag the preview images around the screen and the browser saves the new order. For filmmakers, this can also be a way to create storyboards or photoboards.

Few tools in Photoshop get more use than Histograms and Levels, and they have just received a makeover. The new Histogram tool is a dockable, floating palette available while adjusting an image. Previously, Histograms were only available in an annoying modal window that you had to close to see changes to an image.

Histograms can also display before and after images within the same palette, one on top of another. Individual RGB histogram channels are displayed simultaneously (in earlier versions you could only look at one channel at a time) and it's possible to save a History Log of changes made to an image. This data can be part of the image file or an individual text file that can later be edited.

PS now has Layer Comps and nested Layer Sets. Layer Comps let you create multiple versions of an image in a single file. In the past, users would create a layer set of an image, and by turning layers on and off or by using different blend modes and other adjustments, could produce multiple candidates for a final image or different images. However, each variation had to be saved as a new file. Now you can save one file containing multiple comps with all the variations intact.

To select and preview each of the variations, go to the new Layer Comp palette. There you can cycle through versions with Previous and Next buttons. You can also save the comps as a PDF Slide Show. Comments can be attached to each version of a comp, and clients receiving the file can add their own notes.

Also new to PS CS are Nested Layer Sets. This is another way to organize your files, and should be familiar to After Effects users, who have had nesting capability for years.

Export Layers to files is a real time saver. In the past, if you wanted to save each layer of a 20-layer file as a separate layer, you had to do 20 Save-As operations. In PS CS this is all handled automatically.

Recent prosumer digital cameras allow users to save images in RAW, an uncompressed file format. Adobe now supports the RAW format so that photographers can manipulate their images with the full dynamic range without compression. Naturally, RAW images are much larger files than the JPEG files that most digital cameras save. Still, this helps preserve information in what is already a dynamic-range-challenged medium (compared to film). One convenient feature that is new in the file browser is the ability to batch convert RAW files.

Pixel Aspect Ratio: Unsquare is unfair. Yes, we still live in a world where there are square and not square pixels. Eventually this issue will go away, but not for several years. So it's nice of Adobe to allow us to display pixel aspect ratio with square or rectangular pixels.

(Top) Source image without dept of field. (Middle) Real depth of field achieved in source image by shifting the focus to the foreground. (Bottom) Photoshop's new depth of field filter applied to the source image.

Video Action/Title Safe Guides: These temporary guides are useful and appear in new documents as a preset. Unfortunately, you can't add them to an already-existing document. Very odd. Still, Adobe was right to include the guides and shows greater recognition of their film and video users.

Lens Blur Effect: Depth of field effects are highly sought after by visual effects artists, and it's one of those things that no one has gotten exactly right. There are many filters that attempt to accomplish depth-based blurring, including those from Image Lounge and Tinderbox. The problem is that all these filters are cheats to simulate the circle of confusion, an optical phenomenon that accounts for the progressive blurring in an image. True depth of field presents bright points of light as distinct shapes that have the same shape as the lens aperture.

Photoshop does a good job of faking the look of DOF using a depth map to regulate the degree of blurring within the frame. A depth map is luminance based and can be derived from a layer mask or an alpha channel. Typically this is a black-to-white gradient. This introduces vertical perspective typically arranged so that objects at the lowest part of the frame are blurred more than objects at the top of the frame. The limitation of this solution is that overlapping objects, one far and one near, are blurred the same amount.

Shadow/Highlight Filter: My experience with automatic gamma and color correction is that they are a hit or miss affair. Shadow/Highlight is a very definite hit. It becomes useful in any situation where the foreground subject is underexposed because the automatic meter in the camera was influenced more by a strong backlight rather than the foreground subject. The normal way to correct this problem is to create a mask around the foreground element and lighten it without affecting the background.

I used the Shadow/Highlight on images taken in China and was surprised how well the correction worked. There are two sliders: one for the foreground and one for the background. A button for Show More Options reveals additional controls in the window. Taken to extremes, the filter produces soft halos around background areas, but I was able to make significant correction without producing artifacts. I would very much like to see a version of this in After Effects.

Match Color Command: Match Color takes a sample of one image and applies the tonal and color information to another picture. This is useful for making a series of images from the same location consistent or to generate new color schemes by applying color from one image to another image.

Filter Gallery: This is the old Gallery Effects software that is still with Photoshop after all these years. While After Effects seems able to buy a third-party filter set for each new version of AE, Photoshop has not updated Gallery Effects in a very long time. What Adobe has done is improve the previews for the GE in the new Filter Gallery by allowing you to see what one or more filters look like in a preview window before committing to a render. While they may seem like filters from the Mesozoic era, I still find uses for Clouds, Grain and a few other favorites. Check out pluginsworld.com to find all the available filters for Adobe.

(Top) Image shot in China in which the foreground elements are dark. (Bottom) Photoshop's Shadow/Highlight tool is able to intelligently select the dark areas of an image for correction.

Photo Filter: Before the advent of digital image manipulation, color correction filters were standardized glass color filters used on cameras, enlargers, and optical printers. A few years ago, filter manufacturers like Tiffen began selling digital filters, and now Adobe has its own set built into Photoshop. The cool thing is that the Photo Filters can be used as an adjustment layer. Some photographers will appreciate having filters that are calibrated like the old analog system, but I imagine this would be a relatively small number of users.

Picture Package: Print multiple pictures of different sizes on a single sheet of paper. Thank you, Adobe.

Text along a path: Add text to a Bezier path. You can control spacing and letter and word orientation. Text can also be enclosed within a shape. Edit the path or the shape and the text moves accordingly.

Color Replacement tool: A new option in the Healing Brush. You can now paint color onto an image while preserving the underlying textures, highlights, and shadows.

Photomerge: Take separate but contiguous images and create a single panoramic picture.

History Log: Maintain precise track of your work with a text record of your history palette. The information can be added to a file's metadata or attached to an individual file. Include timestamps to know when and how you made an image.

For professionals, the cost of an upgrade or even the full sticker price for Photoshop is fairly easy to bear when you consider the productivity these tools provide. This is a must-have version, if only for the 16-bit feature and the chance to eliminate banding. Photoshop CS is one of the three best new versions in the past decade. Years of indifference to the motion graphics market have been brought to a halt in PS CS with the addition of the first video-specific features. That, plus After Effects 6.0's inclusion and integration of Photoshop text and brush technology, has finally leveraged the power of these leading products.

As for moving to Adobe Creative Suite Premium, that depends on what kind of work you do since CS is really aimed at print designers. At some point, most motion graphics artists end up having to create motion files from print materials. It might be months before I have to use Illustrator or Acrobat for a video or film project, but when that happens I want the workflow to be as smooth as possible.

That also leads us to the other suite of tools, Adobe Video Collection Professional, which includes Photoshop (CS), After Effects Pro, Audition, Encore DVD, and Premiere Pro. If you need both of Adobe's tool suites you end up with a second license to Photoshop, but it's only one-fifth of the total (discounted) price.

Photoshop CS is a particularly important release for motion picture and video professionals. I hope the trend of supporting our industry will continue.