Software Review of:
Adobe Photoshop
Version 6.0 

I’m not trying to scare you off – well, yes I am. There is a steep learning curve for Photoshop. I’ve been using it since version 1.07 (when it shipped on a single 800k disk) and there are still vast areas of the program that are a mystery to me. Quite frankly, for most of the stuff I do a lesser program would suit me fine and I just stick with Photoshop because I have so much learning time invested in it. If I were starting afresh I would probably use a less feature-laden program. 

That being said, I am going to slant this review for the sophisticated user. If you don’t know what a clipping path is, or CYMK color, or the difference between a bitmapped and a vector image, you and your bank account are better off cutting your eyeteeth on a simpler program. If you are already a Photoshop user and mulling over an upgrade or if you have been using another program and have felt a need for higher-end tools, read on!

For the past few years there has been tension in Adobe between print and the Web. Photoshop built its well-deserved reputation as the world’s premier graphics editing software package in the print world. It has found it a little harder to crack into the world of Web graphics and design. 

Adobe, I suspect, has wondered whether it is worth courting those fickle Web folks at the risk of having print designers feel orphaned. Some of Adobe’s first entries into Web design were seriously flawed and never caught on; remember Page Mill? 

Designers are torn, too. Deep down, they really don’t want to have to buy more software. They really, really don’t want have to learn how to use another complex program. But – and this is a big but – they want the best tools for the job. Until version 5.5, Adobe was losing ground to companies such as Macromedia in the tug of war for the hearts, minds and pocket books of Web graphics designers. 

Even the pros don’t always upgrade as often as they should. My friend Christopher illustrates children’s books for major publishers and he just jumped from Ver. 3.0 to Ver. 6.0. If you are still using one of the antiquated versions of Photoshop there is no question: upgrade now. This is the most significant upgrade since layers were introduced in version 3.0.

The upgrade from ver. 5.5 has three key elements:

• It has streamlined the interface making it easier to learn and use
• It has added the ability to create vector graphics, as you can do in Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw
• It has expanded the Web related features of the program

Interface
The main change that experienced Photoshop users will notice is that the options palette has been replaced by a context-sensitive options toolbar. It might not seem like a big deal but Adobe’s execution of this change was brilliant. Trust me, it’s 100% easier to learn and use. It doesn’t get lost. It takes up less screen real estate. It’s brought into prominence options I never knew existed but were present in prior versions. Yet, with all of these changes, it took me about 5 minutes to learn. 

You’ll also notice big changes in the layers palette. Now every effect in every layer is listed separately. Each effect has its own eyeball that you can click on or off you show you exactly what that gradient fill or bevel did to your graphic. By clicking on the effect you can change or delete it. The dialog boxes that accompany the various options have also been greatly enhanced.

The global feature that has Photoshop users doing the happy dance is the improved history. Get this – unlimited undo! Click over to the history tab and you can review every change that you made. Click on a change and pinpoint the place where you did something stupid or ugly, then revert to that point. You can move backward change-by-change by clicking ALT-CTRL-Z. This alone is worth the upgrade.

A completely new feature is annotation tools. Every layer can be annotated with a note or audio file. Annotations are exported if the graphic is exported as an Adobe PDF. This is advertised as a method of communicating with clients or co-designers but I will probably use it to make notes to myself.

A new preset manager organizes custom brushes, shapes, gradients and textures. They can be saved as library files and shared with other Photoshop users. There is also a new layer styles palette. It comes with several preset styles but to make and save one of your own just create a new layer, add layer effects such as drop shadows, gradients, bevels, patterns and textures, then drag that layer into the palette, save it forever and use it in other projects. I am in love with this. It will make projects like designing web buttons a breeze.

One of the things I do a lot is knock the background out of a photo. The extract image command, similar to Corel’s Kockout software, simplifies the process of masking intricate, hard to define edges.

Beyond Pixels
The feature that Adobe is touting most is the new vector drawing tools. In a nutshell, Adobe has always been a paint program, outputting raster, or bit-mapped, pixel-based graphics. There’s nothing inherently wrong with bitmapped graphics. For a photograph or other similar image it’s the only mode that will work. However, when you try to make it bigger or smaller it breaks apart and develops a case of the “jaggies.” Vector images are resolution independent. They are made up of mathematical equations rather than dots. You can make them bigger or smaller and they are just as crisp and clean as the original. 

When Rebecca Brown designs the PC Alamode covers she uses Photoshop for the main image but then flips over to Adobe Illustrator to add the text and solid color banners. Most logos are also designed as vector images. Now, bitmapped and vector art can be created and saved right in Photoshop. This is hot stuff.

A new set of vector drawing tools has been added. You can also design and add your own custom shapes and add them to shape libraries for future use. Using new pathfinder operations, such as add, subtract, intersect and exclude, basic shapes can be combined to create hard-to-make shapes. They can be used as masks and cutouts.

Vector drawing tools are scriptable and can be included in automated actions. The Portable Document Format (PDF) options have also been greatly enhanced, which makes it easier to interface with a high-end prepress system.

I have little experience in vector graphics. I have a copy of Corel Draw installed only to fit text to a path. I’m still finding these tools a little intimidating; they act differently than the bitmapped drawing tools I’ve been using in previous versions of Photoshop. Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw experts should pick them up quickly.

Web features
In version 5.5, Adobe slipped Image Ready 2.0 into the box and integrated it with Photoshop. Image Ready optimizes Web graphics, letting you experiment with different compression levels in GIF and JPG images. It also slices images and generates the HTML code to reassemble them; creates java-scripted rollovers and generates animations. I wrote a review of this last year.. This prior upgrade thrust Photoshop into the mainstream of Web graphics editors. I shelled out almost $200 for an upgrade and now, having used it for a year and a half, can testify it was worth every penny. The closest competitor to Image Ready is Macromedia’s Fireworks. 

Photoshop ver. 6.0 comes with Image Ready 3.0, which has enhanced capabilities. It is more tightly integrated with Photoshop and also with GoLive, Adobe’s answer to Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. It now has the ability to create image maps, or graphics with clickable areas. Sliced images are more sophisticated; with dynamic layer-based slices, you can change the contents of a layer and the effect is automatically applied. Rollover states and effects can be saved in a styles palette for reuse in other projects.

Photoshop itself now has the ability to slice images and generate the HTML required to reassemble them seamlessly. New type and layer effect tools make it easier to create Web buttons quickly. 

Type
The type options have been much enhanced. Most exciting is the ability to simulate text on a path. This is not true text on a path, as you would get in Corel Draw, but by ingenious warping, the effect is much the same. There are about a dozen preset warps, such as arch, shell, ripple and fisheye, but all of them come with real-time sliders that let you tweak everything. I found that if I am trying to get text to hug a graphic, I can keep the graphic on an under layer and eyeball the warp to make it conform. 

The text is also easier to edit. Later versions of Photoshop greatly enhanced the editability of text and this version is even better. The most obvious change is that text is now edited on the canvas instead of in a dialog box. In version 5.5, each block of text had to have the same attributes: same font, same color, same faux italic, same leading. Now, each line or letter can be treated individually. This makes it much easier to add large blocks of text. I took the word TEXT and made each letter a different font and size. Some effects, such as drop shadow, bevel, emboss and the text warp are layer effects and can still only be applied to the entire block or layer of text. Other effects may require that the text be rasterized, which renders it uneditable. 

Liquify
A little thing, but oh so cool! The new liquify command looks and feels much like Kai’s Power Goo. It lets you push, pull, rotate enlarge and shrink different image areas. The best thing about it is that you can just hold down your mouse key and the image starts pulsating of its own free will. 

There are still some things on my Photoshop wish list. I hope to see this is version 7:

1. I often need to put a box around a graphic. In PaintShop Pro this is one mouse click: add borders. I’m sure it can be done now in Photoshop but probably takes 125 steps. 
2. Add more graphic import filters. Photoshop 6.0 now preserves layers in exported TIFF and PDF files; it added some new filters for PBM, wavefront, RLA and Alias PIX formats. A better dialog box makes it easier to import PhotoCD images. Still, I have several clipart programs that include graphics that Photoshop cannot import. I have to pass them through PaintShop Pro and convert them into a format Photoshop recognizes.
3. Add a red eye reduction filter so I don’t have to turn to another program or carry out a dozen painstaking steps. Maybe most Photoshop users are better photographers than I am but this should be a standard option. Perfectionists can still do it the hard way.
4. Handle upgrades more elegantly. I have a lot of third party filters and plugins installed. All of these get dumped in the Adobe/plugin folder. When I upgrade they are in the folder for the wrong version and I have to move them or reinstall them. PaintShop Pro allows you to select multiple folders for filters and plugins; Photoshop requires that they all be in the same folder. I also found that the instructions weren’t clear for transporting actions, libraries and other customized files through an upgrade.
5. Ditch the online help system. With version 6.0 Photoshop moved its Windows help file from the desktop to the Internet. This guarantees that the help files will always be the most current but it doesn’t do you much good when you’re on the road without an Internet connection. Online help can’t be book marked. Even worse, some of the manual is only available on the Internet. When I went looking for instructions on how to use the much touted liquify command the manual sent me to the Internet. Not one word about it in the manual. 
6. Some of the simple changes took me a while to get used to. For example, I use the paint bucket for color fill. It used to have its own icon on the toolbar. Version 6 hid it under the gradient tool. Now that I’ve found it, no sweat. For about a half hour, though, I was saying some nasty things about this upgrade. My solution would be to produce a small upgrade handbook, highlighting what has changed. This used to be there, now it’s here. This used to do that, now it does this, too. It would make it faster for upgraders to get back to speed.
7. Another irritant is the disappearance of the GIF 89a export filter. Web designers know this as the filter that makes the background of a GIF transparent so that the background of the web page shines through. It’s gone. Now I apparently have to make the background transparent on the original graphic or make a matte in the web page background color. I can live with this but it would be nice to have retained the old system until I learned the new one. It makes my life harder in the short run.

Enough belly aching. I love Photoshop 6.0. Adobe has a 23-page document on its Web site that summarizes all of the new features. Obviously, I didn’t mention them all here. If there is something you’ve been lusting after, look to this document.

The retail price is $609; upgrades are $199 (this does not apply to owners of Photoshop LE.) It can be bought directly from Adobe or at most computer stores such as Comp USA. Phone sales are handled from 1-888-724-4508. You can download a tryout version from the Adobe Website, but you will not be able to save, export or print your output. 

The system requirements are intense. It requires at least 64 MB of RAM, 128 MB if you want to run Photoshop and Image Ready at the same time, which you will want to do if you design for the Web. You need at least Windows 98SE and a Pentium class processor. You need a monitor with at least a 256-color (8-bit or greater) video card.