Portable Adobe Photoshop CS3

Photoshop CS3 delivers a few head-turning new features, and many fixes to older features.

This review will focus on the standard Photoshop CS3 edition. You may have heard that Photoshop CS3 also ships in an "Extended" edition, which includes additional, high-end features aimed at video and film users, and scientific applications. For example, with the Extended version, you can use the Clone Stamp tool to clone across multiple video frames.

The Extended version also provides extensive 3D support, allowing you to import 3D objects for compositing and texturing. Special 2D and 3D measurement tools, as well as extensive support for MATLAB, will appeal to research professionals and others who need to analyze images. In general, it's safe to say that photographers, designers, and other "creative professionals" won't need to spring for the Extended edition. That's especially welcome given its price: $999 for the full version and $349 for an upgrade, compared to $649 full/$199 upgrade for the standard Photoshop.

Peppier Performance
For Mac users, one of the most significant changes in CS3 will be the Intel-native code, which lets Intel Macs finally run Photoshop at full speed. The speed differences are not overwhelming, but they are noticeable. Even more important than speed is stability. Photoshop CS3 is less crash-prone on Intel Macs, and Bridge CS3 (which comes bundled with all Photoshop packages) is much more stable than its previous version. (Read the Bridge sidebar, "Captain, Please Report to the Bridge," for more information.)

Improved performance is not limited to Intel Mac users. Windows users and PowerPC Mac users will also notice speed differences, as the program has been optimized all the way around. You'll find perkier performance in a lot of areas.

Interface Changes
There are significant interface changes to Photoshop (and the rest of the apps in the Design editions of the Creative Suite) that you'll see as soon as you open the program. Photoshop's palettes are now contained in special docks, so you can easily expand and collapse entire groups to better manage screen real estate (Figure 1).


Figure 1. As with the rest of the Creative Suite 3 app in the Design editions, palettes are collected into docks that you can collapse and expand.

With a dock collapsed, you can temporarily expand an individual palette by simply clicking on it. You can also tear a palette out of the panel to render it a regular floating palette, and can easily mix and match combinations of docked and floating palettes.

On a larger monitor, you probably won't collapse docks very often, as that leads to more clicking when you need to get to a particular palette. Still, this flexibility is a great addition to a palette-heavy application like Photoshop, particularly if you're working on a laptop.

Probably the first change you'll notice when you open Photoshop is that the main Toolbox is a single column. In CS3, the Toolbox can be displayed in its old, two-column format, or as a single column of tools. Again, the change is designed to maximize your screen real estate.

The Toolbox has a few other changes: the ImageReady launch button is gone, as ImageReady no longer exists. Adobe has decided to favor Fireworks for the types of tasks ImageReady used to handle. The Quick Mask control is now a single button that toggles between Quick Mask and Standard mode, rather than two buttons; and the Full Screen selector is now a pop-up menu. These adjustments all serve to make the Toolbox more streamlined and shouldn't affect your overall productivity (Figure 2).


Figure 2. In addition to the option of keeping the Toolbar in a single column, a few other Toolbar commands have been streamlined into simpler buttons and pop-up menus.

The Option Bar, the horizontal bar that sits beneath the menu bar, has also been altered. The palettes that used to sit in a palette well on the right side of the Option Bar have been moved into their own dock. Adobe has added two new controls to the Option Bar: a button for launching Bridge, and a Workspace menu that provides the same choices as the Window> Workspace menu.

You'll find other interface changes here and there throughout the program -- pop up menus that have different icons, a change in the shape of a palette feature -- but on the whole, there's nothing that will trip up CS and CS2 users as they transition to CS3.

Of course, this upgrade is also different from previous revs because Adobe offered Photoshop CS3 as a public beta for almost five months before the final release. If you've been using the public beta, you're already accustomed to these changes. You shouldn't see any appreciable difference from the public beta, except that things now work properly. For example, in the Mac version of the public beta, the brush cursor display was glitchy. In the release it's back to normal.

If you installed the Photoshop CS3 public beta, you must properly remove the beta before installing the release version -- installing over the beta can lead to instability and other problems. For detailed instructions on removing the beta, go to http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/cs3clean.html. Be sure to read the instructions very carefully and follow each step.

Tonal Corrections
CS3 brings a number of changes and additions to Photoshop's core tonal correction tools -- the basic adjustments that you'll use every day.

The Curves dialog box, an editing staple since Photoshop 1, still allows for the same types of corrections, but includes a few interface tweaks that make it much easier to use (Figure 3). A histogram is now displayed behind the curve itself, and black and white point sliders are included directly beneath the curve. This lets you use the control like a Levels dialog box for basic white and black adjustments, and then use the curve for midtones and fine tuning.


Figure 3. In Photoshop's new Curves dialog, it's easier to read and adjust the curve.

There are a lot of cosmetic improvements to the Curves dialog. Grid lines are now gray instead of CS2's dotted lines, and when you drag a point on the curve, reference lines appear to help you better see the input/output correspondence.

A few new customization options in the Curves dialog make the following possible:

  • You can change the curve so that it modifies ink percentages instead of tonal brightness.
  • When you edit curves for separate channels, you can see those separate channel displays overlaid in the Curves window.
  • You can display a persistent baseline to provide a reference as you modify the curve.

You can also change the underlying algorithm that controls how Curves re-maps tones as you modify the curve. Three different options let you alter how the curve compresses and expands the tones in your image. For especially tricky adjustments, these options can sometimes save the day.

The Load and Save buttons have been replaced with a new Presets feature, which allows you to save Named presets for easy application onto other images. This holds true for all dialogs that include Load and Save buttons, and it provides a much easier way to manage libraries of customized presets.

Brightness/Contrast
For years, experienced Photoshop users have understood that the Brightness/Contrast adjustment was not a useful tool because it was not intelligent about preserving the black and white points in your image. Brightness/Contrast could easily wreck one end of your histogram if you were trying to work on the other, or on the middle. It rarely preserved the distribution of tones in your image as you made adjustments.

Adobe has corrected that in CS3, and the result is a Brightness/Contrast tool that's actually useful. It now works just as you'd expect: Brightness adjusts the white point to brighten or darken an image while preserving your black point and shadow tones, and Contrast adjusts both to expand or compress contrast in your image.

Experienced users will not find this an ideal replacement for Levels or Curves, but for new users, it could be a much more intuitive way to make initial adjustments. As they work with it, they'll get the chance to better understand the Histogram and can move up to a more comprehensive tool when they're ready.

Black and White
Photoshop CS3 now includes an extremely effective Black and White Conversion option that goes far beyond the Channel Mixer of previous versions (Figure 4). While I could easily name two-dozen ways to make black and white conversions, spending just a little time with Photoshop's new Black and White dialog will probably make you forget about those other procedures.


Figure 4. Photoshop's new Black and White adjustment provides unprecedented control for performing black and white conversions.

The dialog offers six sliders: Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues, and Magentas. Unlike the Channel Mixer, these are not primaries. Therein lies the key to Black and White's greater sophistication. Where the Channel Mixer makes component adjustments -- it adjusts how much each of the red, green, and blue components are weighed in to your conversion mix -- Black and White adjusts the actual colors in your image.

For example, when you move the Red slider in the Channel Mixer, the red components of ALL of the colors in your image are adjusted. So, though you might have been trying to adjust only the green in the stem of a flower, the yellow in the flower's petals might also be adjusted because yellow contains a green component.

In CS3's Black and White converter, when you slide the Green slider, Photoshop figures out which things in your image are green and adjusts only those.

The adjustments themselves work like the Channel Mixer. Drag a slider to the right and those tones will get brighter; drag it to the left and the tones will darken. Each slider is a percentage scale from -200% to 300%. But unlike the Channel Mixer, you don't have to worry about the total of all of your adjustments adding up to 100 because the values are not components.

All of that would be cool enough, but Adobe has gone one better: You don't have to use the sliders at all. Instead, you can click on tones in your image and drag left and right to brighten them. This is a great interface addition and is the main reason you'll probably give up on all other black and white conversion methods. It almost feels like dodging and burning in a real darkroom. You click on a tone and drag a little to brighten or darken it. As with many of CS3's features, Lightroom users will recognize the Back and White adjustment, as the same features are provided in the release version of Lightroom.

One last change: You can add the Black and White adjustment as an Adjustment Layer, affording you the option of using Black and White nondestructively.

Selecting and Filtering
The ability to make corrections is of less value if you can't isolate those corrections to specific parts of your images. Adobe has spent years building up Photoshop's selection tools, because different types of images pose very different selection challenges.

The new Quick Selection tool is one of the most technically impressive selection tools that Adobe has come up with in a while. A combination of a magic wand and a brush, you simply brush the Quick Selection tool over an object in your image, and it automatically figures out the edges of that object and selects it (Figure 5). Depending on how well your object is set off from its background, you may only need one or two small strokes to select it.


Figure 5. I was able to select this dog by simply brushing over it with the Quick Selection tool. For a larger version, click on the image.

You can refine your selection using the Shift and Alt/Option keys. The Auto Enhance button gives you a finer, less blocky edge on your selection, though you may face a performance penalty for using it. I found this slowdown to be negligible on most images.

You can use the Quick Selection tool for the same types of selections that would normally call for the Magic Wand. The Quick Selection tool does a very good job with clearly defined shapes, but you won't find it of much use for fine, wispy detail.

No matter what tools you use for selection, you'll often want to modify the edge of the selection to make it blend more seamlessly with the surrounding area. While previous versions of Photoshop included a Feather Selection command that blurred the selection uniformly around its edge, CS3 provides a much more advanced option in the form of the Refine Edge dialog box (Figure 6).


Figure 6. The new Refine Edge dialog box holds important new options for improving the quality of selection edges.

The main weakness with Feather Selection was that there was no way to see the effects of your feathering. You usually had to apply a feather, try an effect through it, then undo and re-apply with a different feather amount to get different results. Refine Edge improves tremendously upon this by letting you preview your selection interactively as you adjust the setting in the Refine Edge dialog box.

There are several preview backgrounds. You can view your selection composited against black or white backgrounds, displayed as an alpha channel, or displayed against a semi-opaque red background.

While Refine Edge provides a Radius control like Feather Selection, its effect is very different. The Refine Edge command analyzes color values of the pixels around the edge of your selection to determine the opacity values it will assign to the edge. The Radius slider specifies how big an area you want analyzed. Because of this analysis, Refine Edge does a much better job of preserving the hue of colors along a selection's edge as it lowers their transparency. This creates a more subtle transition along the edge.

Where Feather Selection created feathering on both sides of the edge, Refine Edge creates a very subtle fall-off along the edge without the Feather Selection's blurred look.

The other controls allow further refinement. Contrast lets you sharpen the edge to create a more contrasting boundary; and Smooth smears the pixels along the edge; Feather yields the same effect as the old Feather Selection command, but with the advantage that you can preview your effect. Contract/Expand lets you shrink or enlarge your selection by a given number of pixels.

Refine Edge is far superior to the old feather command. However, if you don't have time to learn the new feature, you can fall back on the old Feather command, which has been moved to the Select> Modify menu.

There is one downside to Refine Edge. It can't create non-uniform adjustments to a selection -- the settings you specify are applied evenly around the entire selection. If you want the right side feathered more than the left, you'll need to save your selection as an alpha channel and edit it manually.

Smarter Smart Objects
Adobe introduced Smart Objects in Photoshop CS2 as a way to perform more operations non-destructively. Smart Objects are particularly useful for Raw shooters, as I've discussed in previous articles.

One of the biggest weaknesses of Smart Objects in CS2 was that no one knew about them because they were hidden away in the Place command. You probably didn't even realize that there is a Place command (it's under the File menu).

With CS3, Adobe has wisely brought Smart Objects more up front. A new File> Open As Smart Object command lets you open any image or compatible raw file as a Smart Object. Smart Object behavior is otherwise the same.

Adobe has added one new feature to Smart Objects, which is the ability to alter the way that layers within a Smart Object are merged together. By using the new Layers> Smart Objects> Stack Mode command, you can change the way the layers of an object are combined. For example, if you set a stack of images to Median, Photoshop derives a set of average color values for each pixel by analyzing all of the images in the stack. With the Median filter you can, for example, shoot a crowded plaza full of people and end up with an image that shows an empty plaza. The people are averaged out to reveal only the background (Figure 7).


Figure 7. I shot a series of images as people moved around in front of San Francisco's Ferry Building. Using Stack Mode, Photoshop automatically averaged the people away to leave a mostly empty plaza. (There were a few people who just wouldn't move!) For a larger version, click on the image.

Stack Mode is a very deep feature, and I expect that the bulk of the "cool CS3 tips" that come out in the next few months will center on Stack Mode. But even if you don't have a use for Stack Mode, Smart Objects are now easier to bring into your normal Photoshop workflow.

Smart Filters
Smart Objects have another new facility in the form of Smart Filters. Smart Filters allow you to apply any type of Photoshop filter to a Smart Object nondestructively -- that is, you don't permanently destroy any pixel data. As with Adjustment Layers, Smart Filters have a built-in layer mask that lets you easily constrain the effects of the Smart Filter to localized areas of the Smart Object.

The advantage of Smart Objects is that they encapsulate your image data -- whether Raw or normal raster data -- in a form that permits a fair amount of nondestructive editing. However, Smart Objects don't allow any pixel-level editing, so you can't use any of Photoshop's brush or retouching tools. With Smart Filters, you can now perform filter-based pixel-level editing on Smart Objects, which greatly expands their usefulness.

For example, you can open a raw file as a Smart Object, adjust its raw parameters, and then apply a Smart Sharpen filter as a Smart Filter. Because Smart Filters are also parametric, you can alter and tweak the sharpen parameters later. In other words, you can perform non-destructive sharpening!

Unfortunately, Smart Filters only affect the Smart Object that they're attached to. Unlike Adjustment Layers, they don't alter an entire composited stack of Smart Objects. So you can't, for example, throw a sharpening Smart Filter on top of a bunch of Smart Objects to sharpen the entire composite.

While Smart Filters make Smart Objects more appealing and give Photoshop far more non-destructive editing power, they're still somewhat awkward to work with and have a bit of a learning curve. Unlike truly non-destructive editing applications, such as Lightroom, Aperture, or Nikon Capture NX, Smart Objects feel a little bit like a hack. But especially if you're a Raw shooter, it's worth your time to learn how to use them.

When Smart Filters were announced, I'd hoped that Adobe had finally added the ability to add filters as Adjustment Layers. Unfortunately, that still isn't true. Obviously, their attention to this issue (in the form of Smart Filters) shows that they're not deaf to the idea, it's simply that Photoshop's architecture makes filter Adjustment Layers very difficult to pull off.

Editing and Compositing
You'll be pleased to see new editing and compositing tools in Photoshop CS3. Probably the most-used retouching tool in Photoshop's toolbox is the Clone Stamp tool, which lets you paint one area of an image into another. To use the Clone Stamp tool, you must first select the area you want to copy from. Adobe has made this much easier in CS3 with the addition of a new Clone Source palette (Figure 8).


Figure 8. The new Clone Source palette includes options that greatly ease clone operations.

With the Clone Source palette you can now adjust the clone source point numerically, and you can even rotate and scale the cloned information as you paint with the Clone Stamp.

If you're working with the animation palette, you can specify a frame offset, allowing you to clone from one frame into another. That makes wire removal, retouching, and other rotoscoping tasks simpler.

Finally, the new Show Overlay option superimposes a semi-opaque copy of your source image over the area where you're painting. This means that it's easier to see exactly what image data will be painted in as you brush. While the overlay view can sometimes obscure details as you paint, in other situations it makes cloning much simpler.

Like Curves, the Clone Stamp tool has been around since the first version of Photoshop. That Adobe is paying attention to how these well-established tools work shows that the company really listened to how we use their software.

Two new commands, Auto-Align Layers and Auto-Blend Layers, make short work of certain types of composites. Auto-Align Layers automatically analyzes two layers in an image and repositions the upper one so that the images are aligned.

This command has many compositing uses. For example, you can combine elements from different shots by Auto-Aligning your separate frames, then using the Eraser tool or a Layer Mask to paint in only the elements you want from each layer.

Auto-Align Layers doesn't do anything you couldn't do by hand using the Transform command, but I'm happy to pass on this drudgery to Photoshop, especially since it does such a good job.

Auto-Blend Layers automatically blends two layers into a single image without leaving a seam. When combined with Auto-Align Layers, it provides an excellent stitching solution for panoramic shooters. Photoshop CS3's PhotoMerge command relies on these underlying technologies.

Auto-Blend Layers is so accurate that it's now a practical alternative to dedicated photo stitching applications. I especially like the fact that Photoshop provides access to the masking data used to create the blends. After blending, each layer has a layer mask that controls how the layers are combined. You can easily edit these masks to refine or alter any blending.

Improved 32-bit Support
Adobe added support for 32-bit images to CS2, and CS3 now allows for a few more edits to be performed in 32-bit mode. For instance, a 32-bit image can contain layers, with layer masks, and a several types of adjustment layers (Solid Color, Gradient, Pattern, Levels, Hue/Saturation, Channel Mixer, Photo Mixer, and Exposure). The Fibers, Emboss, Maximum, and Minimum filters now work with 32-bit images (as do the normal layer blending modes), and with two special 32-bit modes, Height and Linear Height.

For re-touching, the Brush, Pencil, Pattern Stamp, Eraser, Gradient, Blur, Sharpen, Smudge and Type tools now work on 32-bit images, and Adobe threw in a new HDR color picker.

What do all of these options mean? For most people, not much. But if you shoot HDR (High Dynamic Range) images, or like to perform other edits in a huge bit depth, you can now perform more retouchings and edits in 32-bit mode before sampling down to 16 or 8 bit mode.

Photoshop's Merge to HDR feature has seen a few tweaks. Its internal algorithms have been improved, so merge performance is faster. Merge to HDR now stores response curves for each type of camera that you use; the practical upshot being that, over time, you should see improved accuracy from specific camera types, as the Merge to HDR command gathers more data.

The overall process of merging remains the same, though the Merge to HDR dialog box now includes a Response Curve section in which you can save Response Curves, so as to perform special types of calibration.

Merge to HDR still lacks a tone-mapping feature, and the process of downsampling to 16-bits is still complicated and difficult to understand.

Output
If you've printed with Photoshop, you know that it provides an excellent color engine capable of very fine reproductions. You also know that wending through Photoshop's Page Setup, Print, and color-management dialog boxes can be tedious and confusing. What's more, should you miss one setting or checkbox, you could waste paper and ink.

In CS3, Adobe has somewhat simplified the printing process. The Print and Print with Preview commands have been rolled into a single Print dialog box (Figure 9). Most importantly, the preview thumbnail that's shown in the Print dialog box is now color managed. While the thumbnail is too small for any serious image assessment, the fact that it's color managed makes it much easier to immediately recognize if you've configured your Photoshop color management settings properly.


Figure 9. Photoshop's new Print dialog has all of the options that used to be in the Print with Preview dialog box, and it now includes a color-managed thumbnail. For a larger version, click on the image.

Most people these days are shooting with cameras that capture a huge number of pixels. Few of these shooters print their images; instead, they post them on the Web or email the images. That means the final images include far less data than cameras capture.

To help people easily present larger images with more detail, Adobe has licensed Zoomify, an export plug-in that creates Web pages with ordinary JPEG images at typical Web resolutions. The pages also include a series of higher-resolution images that users can view using simple zooming and panning controls. The Zoomify plug-in takes care of coding the back end and creates very cool results.

Photoshop CS3 can export directly to Device Central, Adobe's new tool for prototyping content for mobile devices.

Camera Raw 4
Included with Photoshop CS3 is the newest version of Photoshop Camera Raw, Adobe's powerful Raw conversion plug-in that is essentially a complete Raw editing environment within Photoshop and Bridge. Because the plug-in can be hosted by either app, you can choose to have Photoshop handle batch raw processing while you work in Bridge, or vice versa.

Overall Raw workflow remains the same in Camera Raw 4. The Camera Raw 4 dialog box has the same basic layout as previous versions, so experienced users can quickly orient themselves. However, Camera Raw 4 adds several important new features (all of which are also in Photoshop Lightroom), and some things have changed in the dialog box to accommodate the new features (Figure 10).


Figure 10. Camera Raw's dialog box has seen some slight modifications that are necessary to house the program's new features. For a larger version, click on the image.

Camera Raw now has a full-screen mode that fills the whole screen with the Camera Raw interface. Since many Raw shooters perform their entire workflow in Camera Raw (rendering Photoshop something of an add-on to Camera Raw), this is a great addition. You can toggle in and out of full-screen mode by pressing F.

The Workflow options -- image size, color space, etc. -- from previous versions have been moved to a separate dialog box to free up more space for a larger preview image.

There are two new tools in the Camera Raw toolbox. A red-eye tool makes quick work of removing that bothersome visual artifact, and the Retouch tool lets you perform simple clone and spot healing tools. You won't pull off any major retouchings with these tools, but you can easily deal with sensor dust and other spotting problems.

There are now eight tabs of parameter controls for performing raw conversions:

Basic. The Basic tab contains Camera Raw's familiar sliders, with a few additions. A Recover slider lets you recover highlights without darkening your overall image. The Recovery slider limits its adjustment to the brightest tones in your image. This is a great addition that saves a lot of time.

Fill Light. Fill Light is a perceptual shadow tool like the Shadow slider in the Shadow/Highlight adjustment in Photoshop. It adds a new Vibrance slider, which performs a saturation adjustment that protects certain tones. For example, you can use the Vibrancy slider to increase the saturation in an image without affecting skin tones.

Tone Curve. The Camera Raw 4 Tone Curve includes sliders for adjusting the curve. While they don't add any functionality, they make the Tone Curve much easier to use. The old point-based Curve is still available.

Detail. Detail continues to provide basic sharpening and noise reduction controls.

HSL / Grayscale. This new option provides an eight-channel HSL control that also includes a Grayscale option, letting you perform grayscale conversion without going into Photoshop. While the grayscale tools aren't quite is powerful as Photoshop's Black and White dialog, they're pretty close, and having these features within Camera Raw can greatly simplify your workflow.

Split Toning. The Split Toning tab lets you apply separate color tonings to the highlights and shadows in your image.

Lens Corrections. This continues to offer chromatic aberration and vignetting controls.

Camera Calibration. This control is unchanged from previous versions.

Presets. In Presets, you can save named versions of your entire Camera Raw parameter set and easily apply the same settings to multiple images.

The changes to Camera Raw are thorough, well thought-out, and very welcome. For the serious Raw shooter, Adobe's additions to the plug-in mean that you can spend more time in Camera Raw and less time in Photoshop.

The Last Word
This upgrade is a no-brainer if you're a regular Photoshop user. The combination of enhancements to staple features, such as Curves and the Clone Stamp, combined with powerful new additions like the Black and White conversion and Camera Raw enhancements, mean that there's something for everyone in this update. Intel Mac users will want to upgrade simply for the Intel-native code, but they'll be most satisfied by the new features.

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