No Reason Not To Upgrade To Photoshop CS3

It’s an exciting time for Photoshop!

I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited for Photoshop, except maybe Spring 2004 when Photoshop CS was new and Bryan Lamkin announced the DNG file format at Photoshop World (well, DNG hasn’t turned out to be as groundbreaking as PDF, but it was still exciting). Creative Suite 3 is now getting out into the public’s hands. Photoshop CS3 was actually not emphasized as much as Illustrator, Flash and other products when CS3 was launched a couple months ago, and it’s pretty obvious this is because Photoshop CS3 has been around for months now as a public beta and recently was confirmed by John Nack to have been downloaded by a half-million people. There’s all kinds of Photoshop CS3 videos, tutorials and tips out there at places like lynda.com, NAPP and photoshopcafe.com. A post from John Nack’s blog with links to various free sources can be found here.

STANDARD AND EXTENDED

What we didn’t know until the March 27 media event was that the public beta we’ve been playing with all this time is Photoshop CS3 Standard—this is something I predicted here and wasn’t that hard to figure out if you paid attention to the public beta’s splash screen. Along with Standard, there is a Photoshop CS3 Extended—a more powerful version of Photoshop—that will be included with all premium CS3 suites and the Master Collection (the CS3 Design Standard suite gets Photoshop CS3 Standard, and the CS3 Web Standard suite gets neither in lieu of Fireworks CS3). I wonder how Adobe is going to support such a wide variety of image editing applications—Photoshop Elements is still around too. There is such a thing as oversegmentation of the market, and it will be interesting to see how Adobe handles this glut of products that came about after the Macromedia merger. One method already being used is repositioning a product: Fireworks CS3 is now a web prototyping application, with a secondary purpose as an image-editing application. I have been using Fireworks for a month or so now as my primary web graphics application, and I will review that application in early June.

Photoshop CS3 has many new features, and several of them contribute major advances in how creative professionals work with images.

NEW FEATURES IN CS3 STANDARD

The Layers panel, showing a couple smart filters. Notice the mask!

Smart filters. Users have wanted this one for a long time, and it’s here: the ability to apply non-destructive smart filters to layers. It’s done by making the layer a smart object and then applying the filter; this is different than adjustment layers, which don’t need a smart object to do their magic. There’s a mask attached to the smart filters so you can keep pixels unfiltered, same as with adjustment layers. This is an exciting new features for Photoshop CS3, something that’s a no-brainer and will make a lot of Photoshop users happy. If you are a member of NAPP and saw the special issue on CS3, you’ll get a kick out of Deke McClelland’s story of the history of smart filters (and how he’s pined for them for years). Due to the nature of filters, the layer does need to be converted to a smart object manually with Filter -> Convert For Smart Filters. I think the next version of Photoshop needs to make this seamless, whether it finds a way to do it without smart objects or it simply converts it for users behind the scenes.

A selection made by the Quick Selection tool. This is in Quick Mask mode to show the selection.

Quick Selection. One of my favorite Photoshop tools is the Magic Wand tool, so you can imagine my shock when its icon in the toolbar was replaced by the Quick Selection tool (don’t worry, the Magic Wand tool is still there, bundled with the Quick Selection tool in the same toolbar icon). Quick Selection allows you to select areas of similar color with a paintbrush motion rather than a single click like the Magic Wand tool does, and it works pretty well though it takes a little practice and sometimes some tweaking afterwards in the new Refine Edge dialog box. It reminds me of the Magnetic Lasso tool, another attempted solution at making pixel selections easy and natural. I don’t know anyone who likes the Magnetic Lasso tool, though I do and think others would too if they have the right image and use the right tool settings.

I am still playing with the Quick Selection tool, trying to make it work as well as the Magic Wand tool for what I use it for. I find that there’s many instances when the Magic Wand tool does just as well as the Quick Selection tool, if not better. I think a big part of that is the lack of control with the Quick Selection tool: there’s no tolerance setting that I can find for this tool. That would help a lot. The Refine Edge dialog box is NOT used to fine-tune the Quick Selection tool; it’s used to refine selections after they are made, and they incorporate the old Select -> Modify settings. However, there are many times when the Quick Selection tool will do much better than the Magic Wand tool at selecting an area, especially if the area has shadows and highlights that will throw off the Magic Wand tool. Quick Selection does a great job in these cases. Overall, I am glad to see the Quick Selection tool in CS3 and I do expect it to overtake the Magic Wand tool as the selection tool of choice—Quick Selection is a “smarter” tool—but it’s not yet perfect. As I learn tips and techniques to maximize its productivity, I’ll post them here.