Adobe Photoshop CS3 is here, and it's a very significant upgrade to the industry standard image editing program. In addition to the regular version there is now also an Extended version, which includes capabilities for specialized images for multimedia, including 3D and motion, and scientific, medical, architectural, engineering and manufacturing applications. A comparison of the two versions is on the Adobe web site at http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/compare/.
Under the hood, it has greatly improved performance on the new Intel Macs. There is no longer a printed manual but the Help menu is more useful, with links to many video tutorials. Go to Photoshop's Help menu and choose What's New for an overview of the new features along with some very useful tutorials.
Bridging the Gap
The first thing you will encounter is the front-end file manager, Bridge, which is greatly improved over Bridge in CS2. When you put a card of images in to be read, Bridge will come up with a downloader which does everything you need. You can specify the destination folder, rename files, and apply metadata, among other things.
Check the Advanced Dialog button in the lower left corner of the box to get the view shown above, in which you can see your images and choose which files to download.
Bridge now has a very sophisticated interface, similar to that of Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture. For me, the new Bridge replaces Lightroom, but photographers who need to get large numbers of images to the web or to print without taking time for individual fine-tuning and local adjustments in Photoshop may find Lightroom is just what they need.
Bridge is claimed to be faster but it still benefits greatly from a fast processor and a fast hard drive with lots of un-fragmented space. It also helps to not have too many images in each individual folder.
There is so much information on the Bridge screen you will want to be sure to maximize it. It comes with several workspaces which facilitate different tasks. The list of workspaces is accessed by clicking and holding for a second on any one of the three workspace icons--the rectangles numbered 1 through 3 in the lower right of the screen, below.
Each icon may be assigned to a workspace by bringing up the list for it in this way and then checking the desired workspace. You can then just click the icon to change to its workspace on the fly. You can customize any number of workspaces and save them to the list.
One of the features I use most is the Preview pane, which is only a useful size in the Horizontal or Vertical Filmstrip workspace. Using it, you can control-click on two or more images to compare them side by side. (It helps to enlarge the Preview pane to maximize its size, by dragging the pane dividers.) You can click on any point in an image and a loupe pops up to let you evaluate sharpness.
In the various panes you can look at metadata, enter keywords, and sort images by many criteria. You can drag and drop files to manually rearrange their order and that order will be preserved in all the workspaces. (The Light Table workspace is great for this.) Your new order will be saved for subsequent sessions.
Camera Raw
Double-clicking a RAW file in Bridge opens Adobe Camera Raw, my favorite conversion utility. I like to enlarge the window to fill the screen by clicking the icon between the Histogram and the Preview check box.
One of the first things to look at in any newly-installed program is its preferences. The settings for Camera Raw have been moved to Bridge, under Edit > Camera Raw Preferences. I like to set the option to sharpen only the preview, and not the converted image, which many experts recommend. (If you do choose to sharpen in RAW conversion, be very conservative. Sharpening is not magic, it isn't even really sharpening, and it creates artifacts which will be magnified in any later sharpening steps. I prefer to do it only once, after an image has been resized for printing or whatever other use.)
You can open multiple images for conversion by selecting them in Bridge and clicking File > Open in Camera Raw. You can then apply the same settings (such as a color temperature correction) to all of them or to a selected subset by correcting one of them and clicking the box at the top labeled Synchronize.
At the bottom center of the Camera Raw window, in the text underlined in blue, you can set the color space, bit depth, image size and resolution. You also have options at the bottom of the screen (left to right) to convert the image and save it in one of several formats without opening it in Photoshop, converting and opening it in Photoshop, canceling, or saving the Camera Raw settings without converting. In the last case, the next time you bring up that file in Camera Raw it will have the settings you made (which can, of course, be modified further.)
You can now open JPEG and TIFF files as well as RAWs in Camera Raw, by double-clicking them from Bridge. The adjustments are not as good as from a RAW file, but still offer a good option for files that weren't shot in RAW. Adjustments made directly to a RAW file are best because the data is in 12- to 14-bit (depending on the camera) so there is essentially no posterization of tonalities in the histogram when you convert the data into an image file. And you can't recover blown-out highlights or blocked-up shadows that have been locked into a JPEG or TIFF.
On the right side of the Camera Raw dialog box there are some wonderful new conversion controls. Fill Light and Recovery are similar to the Shadow-Highlight adjustment in Photoshop. Clarity (added in the 2.1 update) adds midtone contrast. Vibrance is similar to saturation but doesn't become garish so easily. The eight tabs just under the histogram offer many more options for fine-tuning, but the main settings are under the first tab.
Photoshop
You can set the menus to show new or changed items highlighted in blue by going to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts. Click on the Menus tab and in the top box choose What's New – CS3.
The workspace has some improvements. The palettes can be collapsed with the double arrow on their top right. To the top left of the palettes is a vertical row of icons for Tool Presets, Brushes, Clone Source, Character, Paragraph and Layer Comp. These can be expanded or collapsed with the double-arrow above them. The toolbar is now a single column, but can be toggled to the familiar double column with the double arrow above it. A single icon now toggles between Quick Mask and Standard modes, and another, below it, toggles between the four screen modes.
A new Quick Selection Tool is more magic than the Magic Wand. With a selection in effect, Select > Refine Edge combines into one dialog the alterations that allow you to fine-tune the selection. In addition, your image changes to show the selection as a cutout. You can see this tool in action in my tutorial, Changing Colors Selectively
A new image adjustment called Black and White is easier than Channel Mixer. It can give different and more dramatic results, but you can get edge artifacts in some cases if you overdo it. Zoom to 100 percent to check. Pulling Reds to the right gives a lovely glowing infrared effect on tanned skin, and Greens will make foliage pop. There are presets that simulate colored filters used in black and white photography at the top, and controls for toning at the bottom of the dialog.
The new Smart Filters are awesome. They let you apply most filters (except Liquefy and Vanishing Point) as a non-destructive adjustment layer. Make an image layer (including the Background) into a Smart Object (Filter > Convert for Smart Filters) then apply a filter. You can mask the filter, change its settings after the fact (double-click on its name), apply several filters to same layer and change the order in which they are applied. This needs some processing power and RAM. If you get a message that there is not enough RAM, try closing all other open programs.
Photoshop CS3 has dramatically improved alignment and merging capabilities. The revamped panorama stitcher is a great improvement (File > Automate > Photomerge.) The new auto layer alignment and blending is incredible (Edit > Auto Align Layers.) Just stack several shots of the same scene as layers in the same image. Photoshop will move, rotate and distort as needed to get the best overlap, then leave them as layers so you can blend them with masks. This is great for compositing the best expressions from several exposures of a group shot, or for several exposures of a near-to-far scene at different focal points. Look at Help: Automatically align image layers for further information.
The Print dialog has also changed. To the right of the preview image there is a Page Setup button which takes you to the printer driver Preferences. You should make the desired settings here. It is possible to skip setting them here and set them later. After you have filled in the other settings and hit Print in the lower right, Windows comes up with a list of your printers (even if you only have one) and gives you a Preferences button. But if you make the settings here instead of from the Photoshop Print dialog box, and they differ from what was previously in the Preferences, you can get an error in positioning the print on the page. This can be seen in the Print Preview dialog if you have it turned on.
For an overview of the settings on the right hand side of the dialog box, see my tutorial, Advanced Digital Printing: Take Control. Although it was written for the screen layouts of CS2, the basic information is the same.
There are many more new features but these touch on the highlights. For me, this is a "must-have" version of Photoshop. If you have a previous version from 7.0 on, the upgrade price is $200. The non-upgrade price for CS3 is $649. The upgrade price on Extended is $349, and the non-upgrade price is $999.
Even though it is called an upgrade, each new version of Photoshop is a stand-alone program that installs separately from any prior version. You just get a price break if you have a recent prior version. You can keep your older version and use both, but you won't want to for long. On installation be sure to set it to check for upgrades automatically. Camera Raw is upgraded to accommodate new cameras and Photoshop occasionally has minor upgrades.
Diane Miller is a widely-exhibited freelance photographer who lives north of San Francisco, in the Wine Country, and specializes in fine-art nature photography. Her work, which can be found on her web site, www.DianeDMiller.com, has been published and exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest. Many of her images are represented for stock by www.MonsoonImages.com.
© 2007 Adorama
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