- ComputerUser Eyes The New Photoshop

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ComputerUser Eyes The New Photoshop

Image-Grabbers Will Enjoy Improvements In Productivity

ComputerUser magazine Adobe Photoshop has always been a useful tool for designers and photographers, but if you wanted to create graphics for the World Wide Web, more often than not, you had to add plug-ins or reach for another program. Many Web designers turned to Adobe's ImageReady to prepare graphics for the Web, even if they had Photoshop.

Not anymore.

Adobe promotional image for Photoshop With the introduction of Photoshop 5.5, you can create great-looking images as well as reuse existing graphics for use on the World Wide Web. Photoshop 5.5 now comes bundled with Adobe's ImageReady 2.0 software, eliminating the need to purchase another Web-oriented application. ImageReady will no longer be sold as a stand-alone product.

As with previous versions, there are no flashy new features, just improvements in a familiar and mostly unchanged interface that lets serious users of Photoshop become instantly productive. At a casual glance, the only change is a Jump To button located at the bottom of Photoshop's tool palette. Clicking it transfers the image you're working on into ImageReady--after it's been saved.

From Adobe product demo If you needed any indication that Photoshop 5.5 is more Web-aware, look no further than the Save for Web command in the File menu. This new feature brings the number of Save commands found in the program to four. In addition to Save for Web, there are Save, Save As and the eminently useful Save a Copy. Selecting Save for Web launches a Multiple LiveView panel that simultaneously shows up to four versions of your original image so you can determine the best options for shorter download time and higher-image-quality Web graphics.

Photoshop 5.5 supports the new Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.3 standard that was introduced with Adobe Acrobat 4.0. You can also save files in many standard graphic-file formats, including GIF, JPEG and PNG, as well as a new "Lossy GIF" feature that reduces file size by as much as 10 to 50 percent over other GIF formats with minimal loss of image quality. You can also automatically preview graphics in any Internet browser software.

Yanking Parts Out Of Pictures

One of the new version's most useful commands is Extract Image. It allows you pull a section of a photograph-even one with soft, wispy edges-out of its background. While this could be accomplished using Photoshop's Quick Mask feature, you often had to spend many minutes or even hours using the Brush and Eraser tool to get the mask to perfectly cover an irregular image. Extract Image, which is found in the Image menu, lets you use an Edge Highlighter tool to circle an object and quickly and easily yank the object out of its background. A dialog box controls the smoothness of the extraction and brush size used. There's even a preview that lets you to see if it looks the way you want before extracting.

Photoshop has always boasted selection tools that let you selectively apply effects. A new Background Eraser tool lets you select a pixel color and tolerance level, much as you might do with the Magic Wand tool, then brush away all matching pixels from the image. When used with Extract Image's color decontamination capabilities, it can create a transparency so that an image can be composited onto another background--saving hours of working with complex selections.

Text And Effects

Text handling, always one of the program's weakest features, is better with the new version's improved anti-aliasing options for better on-screen legibility.

Photoshop wouldn't be Photoshop without a few interesting new special-effects tools. The new Art History Brush lets users create an entirely new image by moving the brush around on an image to create realistic paint strokes. You can control the size, opacity, fidelity, tolerance and stroke style.

While it's only an incremental update, any designer or photographer who needs to create images for the Web also needs a copy of Photoshop 5.5. Product specs:
Adobe Photoshop 5.5. System Requirements: (Mac OS) PowerPC-based Macintosh computer, System 7.6 or later, 64 MB RAM (96MB required to run Photoshop 5.5 and ImageReady 2.0 concurrently), 24-bit color, and CD-ROM drive. (Windows) Pentium or faster, Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT, 64MB RAM (96MB required to run Photoshop 5.5 and ImageReady 2.0 concurrently), 125MB hard disk space, 24-bit color, and CD-ROM drive. Adobe Systems Inc., 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA 95110-2704, 408-536-6000, fax: 408-537-6000, Internet: www.adobe.com. Street price: $609.

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