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THE MAC PRODUCT EXPERTS Power Guide vo Adobe Photoshop ys ? NB aan KO Y wits: E Lr, ~ ea: Ee Copyright © 2002, MacPublishing LLC. sajas dflkjasdflkasjd flkasjdf askdjf sadlkfjsdflksdf Isdkjf Iskfflsajas dflkjasdfikasjd fikasjdf l;askdjf sadlkfjsd fiksdjf Isdkjf Iskafjfisajas dflkjasdfkasid flkasjdf l;askajf sadlljsd fiksdlf Isdkff Iskafjflsajas dfikjasdflkasjd flkasjdf Laskdjf sadlkfjsd fiksdjfIsdkjf Iskfjfisajas dflkjasdflkasjd flkasjdf www.macworld.com PHOTOSHOP 7.0 ma WAC @ Is BY | DEKE McCLELLAND AND KELLY LUNSFORD Well PHOTOSHOP FOR MAC OS X ARRIVES: Ol) R Me GWE! E'WEy | ACIGn Apple has spent the last four years promoting Mac OS X as the future of the Macintosh—that Apple’s existence hinges on the public's adoption of the new operating system is not an over- statement. And yet, for many Mac users, moving to OS X has been contingent on a factor that Apple can’t control: the availability of an OS X—native version of Adobe Photoshop. With Adobe’s announcement of Photoshop 7.0 for OS X, the wait is finally over. But OS X compatibility isn’t Photoshop's only new feature. Building on the improvements in previous ver- sions—which saw the introduction of the History palette, editable text, layer effects, vector-based draw- ing, and a host of Web tools—Adobe (800/833-6687, www.adobe.com) offers several innovative new tools designed to make graphics professionals more produc- tive, whether they spend their time painting, retouch ing, sorting through large image collections, or building rollover effects for the Web. Adobe says it will ship Photoshop 7 this spring. Since the program is still a beta, we can’t yet test it for speed or reliability. But we can give you an in-depth sneak peek at one of this year’s most anticipated software releases. PHOTOSHOP 7.0 ; ‘ © Brush Me, Heal Me | You can quickly fix a multitude of flaws with Photo- shop 7’s Healing brush and Patch tool; both let you copy texture from one part of an image to another while preserving the latter area’s original color. To show you how to put these two new tools to work, | started with a less-than-perfect photo of myself (left) taken with an Olympus E-10 digital camera. | then went to work on giving myself a digital makeover. OS X Native In addition to running on OS 9.1 and 9.2, Photoshop 7 is fully compatible with OS X 10.1.1 and higher. This is good news for designers, photographers, and pre- press professionals who have been cautiously waiting for Adobe before making the transition to OS X. Using the Healing Brush An OS X version of Photoshop fills the last remain- My first task was to erase the tiny bumps from under my eyes. | selected the ing gap in Adobe's suite of graphics and publishing Healing brush by pressing the J key (the shortcut previously assigned to the tools (OS X versions of InDesign and Illustrator are already on store shelves) and affirms the company’s commitment to Apple’s new operating system. But don’t expect any OS X-only features. As with Adobe's other OS X applications, Photoshop 7 offers the same features and functionality on both operating systems. However, the move to OS X does mean that Photo- shop, notorious for hogging system resources, can now take advantage of OS X’s inherent strengths, such as protected memory and preemptive multitasking. One problem Photoshop 7 users may face in OS X is a lack of plug-in support; plug-ins have yet to run natively in OS X (see “The Waiting Game”). But accord- ing to Adobe, most Photoshop 6 plug-ins will work with version 7 in OS 9 or in OS X’s Classic mode. However, plug-ins that require direct access to SCSI devices, such Airbrush tool). Then | option-clicked inside the image to set the point from which | wanted to clone the texture. In this case, | chose the shadow to the side of my nose, where the skin appeared smoother GN. Having set the source point, | painted over the flawed portion of the image. | began my brushstroke inside the shadow just below my eye. This ensured that the shadows from the source and destination areas © would align prop- | erly. After Photo- shop completed the drag, it took a moment to blend the colors around the brushstroke & with the texture from the source. as scanners and printers, may not work even in Classic. If you're not satisfied with the results, you Therefore, if you depend on a third-party plug-in for can undo the healing, deselect the Align your day-to-day work, you should find out whether the option in the Options bar (to avoid replaying manufacturer has plans to update it. ‘the same stroke), and try your drag again. Painting and Retouching Using the Patch Tool Photoshop has never been known for its painting abili- For larger areas that don’t respond well to ties, so one of Adobe's priorities for Photoshop 7 was to overhaul the program's painting engine. To that end, ‘Adobe enlisted programmer Jerry Harris, codeveloper of the Mac’ first color painting program, PixelPaint. The results are some of Photoshop 7’s most impressive new features—not just for artists, but for anyone who uses a brush, whether it’s to retouch, mask, dodge, or smear. Painting Tools With Photoshop 6, Adobe axed the floating Brushes palette. In version 7, they’ve brought it back (with its old keyboard shortcut, F5) and put it on steroids. The revised Brushes palette features mul- tiple panels and more than 50 new settings and vari- ables; combined, they give you new levels of control over your brushstrokes (see “A Better Brush”). Although they’re not as powerful as those in Pro- create’ Painter 7 (800/772-6735, www.procreate.com), the selection, using Photoshop 7's painting tools let you easily create effects 3 texture from the you couldn’t in previous versions of the program. For new area DB) ai the calor thatsurround example, you can now add jitter to your brushes, spread the original selection outline. paint droplets, mix foreground and background colors, The results are smooth skin and a much- paint textured strokes, and scale custom brushes. Most improved complexion.—DEKE McCLELLAND brush parameters respond to input from pressure- the Healing brush, such as the scars on my forehead, the Patch tool can offer an easier solution. First, | selected the area | wanted to fix with the Lasso tool (@. (You can use any selection tool or method you like for this part.) | feathered the selection slightly to blur it and soften the transitions. Then, with the Patch tool selected (shift-)), | dragged the selection out- line to an area of the image with smoother skin. The moment | released, Photoshop healed sensitive tablets. Photoshop 7 even introduces support for more-sophisticated stylus input such as tilt and thumbwheel, bringing the program up-to-speed with the present generation of tablets from Wacom (800/ 922-9348, www.wacom.com). Of course, all these settings take some getting used to. Fortunately, the bottom of the Brushes palette includes a live preview window, so you can immediately see the effect of different parameters on your brush. The pro- gram also ships with hundreds of brush presets, so you can start painting without having to set your own. The Healing Tools Photographers and designers who find themselves spending a lot of time laboriously fix- ing scratches, blemishes, and other imperfections with Photoshop’s Stamp tool will appreciate Photoshop 7’s two new cloning tools, the Healing brush and the Patch tool. They provide quicker, more-consistent results for basic touch-ups. Like the Stamp tool, the Healing brush clones pixels to cover up flaws. But instead of copying colors from one portion of an image and applying them to another, the Healing brush clones only the texture, drawing the color from the area around the imperfection (see “Brush Me, Heal Me”). This makes the tool well suited to touching up wrinkles and other facial imperfections, since the color in such areas may be fine even though the texture needs to be fixed. The Patch tool performs the same function as the Healing brush, but it lets you select large areas for healing rather than manually brushing on the effect. Neither tool will take away all the mundane work of retouching photos, but by sam- pling color and texture independently, Photoshop is often able to create patches that appear entirely consis- tent with their surroundings. Good-bye, Airbrush Some longtime users will be sur- prised by the disappearance of the Airbrush tool from the toolbox. The Airbrush feature is now available to painting and editing tools via a toggle in the Options bar. This means that you can use any brush to lay down a continuous stream of color, even when you hold the cursor still—useful when you want to gradually build up color for an effect such as dodging. You can also control the rate at which an effect flows, analogous to the old Airbrush tool’s Pressure setting. The File Browser Managing your digital images sometimes takes more time than editing them. You must sort through meaning- less file names, rotate portrait shots, and review multiple versions of the same scene. For years, less-expensive image editors, including Adobe's $99 Photoshop Ele- ments, have addressed this problem by offering image browsers, windows that let you preview entire folders of images. Now Photoshop includes one as well. The File Browser feature offers an efficient way to view, manage, and select your files without ever leaving the program. Getting the Big Picture As in Photoshop Elements, the File Browser palette in Photoshop 7 is resizable, and 000 || Brushes oO) Brush Presets Mode:{ Colr Bum [} Brush Tip Shape & > &F shape Dynamics 36 as | es Oscattering : OTexture un too | 40 ual Brush * color Dynamics » other Dynamics 23 ENoise Diameter (Diwet Edges 1s Spacing eas O Airbrush ‘i A ’ SI smoothing = ——— = Protect Texture | py Count —. <j Tall a] you can dock the File Browser when it’s in the way. But A Better Brush this is where the similarities end. Whereas Photoshop _ The reinstated Elements’ browser is bare-bones and difficult to navi- Brushes palette gate, Photoshop 7° is full-bodied and handy, giving you contains eight a folder explorer that shows all of the thumbnails for a _ panels, 50 new selected file (with three options for thumbnail size), as _ options, and a well as the ability to view metadata and EXchangeable __ wealth of presets. Image File (EXIF) data imported from your digital cam- A large preview era (see “Rank and File”). The latter is especially useful — window at the for digital photographers, since it can contain every- bottom of the thing from the date and time an image was captured to _ palette shows you the exposure and flash settings. how your creation Controlling Your Photos Photoshop 7’s File Browser __ will look. also helps you manage your files. Instead of having to repeatedly switch between the Finder and Photoshop, you can now move and rename your files from within the File Browser. You can sort thumbnails by several different criteria (such as the date modified or color profile), or you can assign your own ranking values— useful when you're trying to sift through proofs and compare the best shot with several close runners-up. You can also rotate a portrait shot so that it’s upright; Photoshop then automatically rotates the image when opening it. PHOTOSHOP 7.0 Ss | h A ‘There’s one problem: Photoshop 7 saves all the information from its File Browser in an indepen- dent cache file linked to the folder name, so if you rename the folder, all the thumbnails—as well as ranking and rotation instructions—are lost. This is bad news for designers who share networked volumes: ranking and rotating applied from one computer on a network cannot be seen by others. ‘To address this shortcoming, Photoshop 7 lets you save a separate browser catalog for a folder of images. Networked Photoshop users can use this catalog to access previews and ranking and rotation instructions. You can also include the catalog with your images when archiving them to a CD. ‘Although this information is readable only by Photoshop, it ensures that any work performed inside the File Browser won't be lost later. Workspace and Presets You may spend a lot of time moving palettes, adjusting tool settings, and generally tweaking your environment, especially if you occasionally change your monitor's resolution, as when you're gauging artwork for the Web. ‘To expedite these | © | Photoshop Fine-tunes the Web | When Adobe began bundling its stand-alone Web-graphics application, ImageReady, with Photoshop 5.5, the pair were a powerful one-two punch for Web designers. Photoshop, with its advanced image-editing features, provided the tools necessary for everyday graphics work, while ImageReady came packed with tools for creating dynamic Web elements such as rollovers and animations. In the latest versions of Photoshop and ImageReady (which has jumped from version 3 to version 7, to bring it into parity with Photo- shop), Adobe adds some clever twists on image optimization, as well as several interface improvements geared toward increasing the productivity of Web-graphics pros. Straight to the Web The most essential and frustrating day-to-day task Web designers face is opti- mizing graphics for the Web—finding that delicate balance between maximum image quality and minimal image size. So it's not surprising that when Adobe looked at upgrading Photoshop and ImageReady, it focused most of its atten- tion on the programs’ optimization tools. ImageReady 7 and Photoshop 7 both feature several new tools aimed at giving designers more flexibility and better results when exporting their images to the Web. Setting Your Priorities Optimizing Web output is all about making tough decisions. For example, keeping your company's name crisp and legible may be more important to you than preserving every detail of a background image. Photoshop 7 and ImageReady 7 make it eas- effect on a GIF image—a feathered drop shadow, for example—you currently have to matte that image, replacing the semitransparent pixels with opaque ‘ones, to match the background color of your Web page. If you don’t, you'll be left with a strange halo effect where your smoothly antialiased text or drop shadow ought to be. Unfortunately, matting your graphic also requires that you ‘open and re-export the image with a different matte every time you change your page's background color. To address this dilemma, Photoshop 7 and ImageReady 7 offer dither trans- parency. This option creates the illusion of partial transparency by combining transparent and opaque pixels in a dither pattern. As with standard image dithering, you can choose from three different dither-pattern algorithms when setting up a transparency dither. It's a clever idea that works, more or less—a GIF with dither transparency will look equally good on any solid-color background and will look fine even on a multicolored pattern background, unlike images with solid-color mattes. Unfortunately, the dithering is still rather visible (see “A Different Dither”), and most conscientious Web graphics designers will likely continue to use matte colors (and create multiple iterations of graphics for pages with different back- ground colors) rather than sacrifice the quality of their images. Easy Access Another addition to both programs is a simplified way to define a GIF file's transparency. You can now quickly map any color to trans- parency by clicking on a button in the Color Table. ier to tailor your GIFs and JPEGs by letting you prioritize layers of text and vector art, keeping them relatively intact when it's time to compress your images. By clicking on a small button in the Opti- mize palette, you can set a range of quality levels for your images; the software then cal- culates appropriate settings (dither and los- siness for GIF; quality for JPEG) for your image and attempts to maintain as much quality as possible in those text and vector layers. The end result can be GIFs and JPEGs that retain crisp, clear text even though other parts of the images are dithered or show greater evidence of artifacts. Transparent Changes The GIF file for- mat doesn’t support partial transparency. As a result, when you create a semitransparent A Different Dither Traditional transparent GIF effects (left) are attractive but must be matted to a particular back- ground color. Using ImageReady 7's dither-transparency feature, you can create a transparent effect that looks the same on any background (middle and right). housekeeping tasks, Photoshop 7 lets you save work- spaces and tool presets for easy access anytime. When you save a workspace, Photoshop records the locations of all on-screen palettes and toolboxes. This means that you can set up multiple workspaces, each cus- tomized to a specific task, such as file browsing, retouch- ing, or Web design. Workspaces come in handy when you're sharing a computer with one or more coworkers. ‘Tool presets can save you even more time. These let you store a tool’s settings for reuse later. For example, say you have a printer that creates 3.25-by-4-inch snap- shots. Rather than manually setting these specifications In both programs, the Color Table has also been changed to give users much better feedback about changes to their images. Now when you change a color in your image—including making it transparent—the Color Table displays both the original color and the new color in diagonal wedges of its square. Rollover Redesign In previous versions of ImageReady, creating rollovers—images that change when you move your mouse over them—could get confusing, requiring numerous, repetitive trips between the Rollover palette and the Layers palette. And it was far too easy to misassign layers or button states. ImageReady 7's new Roll- overs palette aims to change all that. Unlike the old Rollover interface, which was modeled on the timeline-based Animation tab, the new Rollovers palette more closely resembles the Layers palette. The Rollovers palette lists each separate rollover action of your image, and beneath each action there's a breakout of what button states you've currently got programmed. By using the palette, you can make changes to rollover states with ease, especially if you're creating dis- jointed rollovers (where mousing over one item causes another item to change). You can also opt to have the Rollovers palette display animation states, making it your one-stop interface for modifying your design’s dynamic characteristics. Secure Galleries Users of Photoshop's Web Gallery feature, especially those who are concerned with copyright infringement, will be happy with the new Watermark feature, which automatically generates watermarks, including ones that contain copyright information, photo or illustration credits, and just about anything else you might imagine. ImageReady Reemerges In general, the new Web features of Photoshop and Image- Ready 7 are modest in nature. But there's one big exception: ImageReady's Rollovers palette. If you've ever struggled while creating complex dynamic interfaces in ImageReady, you may feel that this one feature addition is worth the upgrade price — JASON SNELL 2.2. 2 @. @ @. Wie a Sie — Fie Ta (Se) _New or renamed 01.12 NewYork (OlyE-10) 12-08-01 DekeFacesi€10) @. @. & &. RAR LR = 2 266s. a =e with the Crop tool each time you want to print, you can just select the appropriate preset. Likewise, you can use presets to store custom brushes, clone settings, selec- tion modifiers, and more. Presets also let you keep a record of how you create an effect, so you can replicate it without a lot of fuss. The Small Stuff ‘The rest of Photoshop 7's changes are minor modifi- cations. Some are intended to address user complaints and suggestions; others advance Adobe’s mission to expand promising technologies. Here are a few of the new Photoshop's highlights: Spelling Checker If you create a lot of text in Photo- shop, you'll appreciate the addition of the Check Spelling command, which is identical to the same com- mand in other Adobe applications. In addition, you can now search for and replace text. ify Introduced in Photoshop 6, the Liquify filter lets you distort an image by twisting or stretching its pixels. Version 7 brings some nice improvements to this filter—for example, the ability to zoom and scroll inside the Liquify dialog box, save a distortion grid for use on another image, and take advantage of unlimited undos. To get a better sense of how your distortion will fit in with the rest of your image, you can view other layers within the Liquify dialog box. Auto Color The quick-fix commands Auto Levels and Auto Contrast correct the lightest and darkest col- ors in an image, but they scrupulously avoid the mid- tones. In Photoshop 7, Adobe introduces the Color command, which attempts to automatically correct an image’s gamma values and remove color casts. Blend Modes Photoshop 7 offers five new Blend modes, which let you mix the colors in brushstrokes Rank and File In addition to image thumbnails, Pho- toshop 7's File Browser provides a navigation tree (top left) and access to EXIF data saved with digital photo- graphs (bottom left). PHOTOSHOP 7.0 and layers to create custom dissolves and other effects. ‘To help minimize confusion, Blend modes are now organized more logically than they were in previous versions, with all modes that lighten an image in one group and all that darken an image in another. Renaming Layers To rename a layer in Photoshop 6, you had to option-double-click on it. Photoshop 7 finally lets you rename a layer directly inside the Lay- ers palette simply by clicking on it. The same is also true for channels and paths. Better Eyedropper You can now sample any color vis- ible on screen by dragging it from the image window into the background. This means that you no longer need to copy and paste a color from, say, Adobe Illustra- tor; you can sample it without ever leaving Photoshop. Visible Transformation Handles When you applied a transformation to a very large layer in Photoshop 6, the transformation handles sometimes extended outside the visible area of the window, meaning that you had to zoom way out to see what you were doing. Transforma- tion handles now behave as they did in the old days; they’re always visible inside the window. Pattern Maker Photoshop 7 lets you use repeating pat- terns as textures, useful for emulating paper or canvas effects. The program will ship with predefined patterns, and you can use the Pattern Maker filter to create your own. This filter saves time by automatically generating multiple complex patterns from a selected portion of an image, but there’s no way to paint or edit the patterns. Picture Package Whereas previous versions of the Picture Package command let you print multiple copies of a single photo on one page, Photoshop 7 lets you combine multiple photos—great when you're trying to make the most of expensive coated ink-jet paper stock. You can also label the pictures, although you have little control over the label’s position on the page. PDF Passwords When saving Photoshop documents as annotated PDF images for viewing in Adobe Acro- bat, you can now assign passwords and disable printing or copying. This is particularly useful when you are dis tributing photos from a Web site for approval. WebDAV Like many of Adobe’s applications, Photo- shop 7 lets you check out and edit files from a Web- DAV server, even if that server isn’t located on the local network. Scripting Improved scripting support helps you automate tasks such as cropping. You can use Apple- Script or JavaScript to build and debug your scripts directly within Photoshop 7. The Last Word There are some issues that Adobe didn’t address with this update. For example, you still can’t edit keyboard | © The Waiting Game | ‘An OS X version of Photoshop means that graphics and prepress professionals can, for the first time, seriously consider moving to Apple's new operating system. The only question is: Will their favorite Photoshop plug-ins move with them? Many Photoshop users depend on plug-ins for everything from high-end color cor- rection to unusual image effects. But although most Photoshop 6 plug-ins should work fine with Photoshop 7 running in OS 9 or in OS X's Classic mode, they do not yet run natively in OS X. Many plug-in developers say they're already working to convert their products to OS X; however, the process—rewriting hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of code—takes time. As a result, many companies are taking a selective approach to Carbonizing their software. Instead of trying to rewrite code for every program it offers, Alien Skin Soft- ware (888/921-7546, ww.alienskin.com), maker of the popular Eye Candy plug-in series, says it will focus on having OS X versions of its newest products, such as Eye Candy 4000, available when Photoshop 7 is finally ready to ship. As a result, anyone who depends on Alien Skin’s older plug-ins, such as Xenofex, will have to wait for the next versions to get OS X compatibility. Andromeda Software (800/547-0055, www.andromeda.com), which offers more than a dozen Photoshop filters and plug-ins, is taking the slow and steady approach to OS X compatibility. "We're definitely planning to Carbonize everything,” says Product Manager Louann Barbeau. “But it'll be gradual. We'd love to see them all at once, but our engineers are swamped.” According to Barbeau, Andromeda will Carbonize each of its plug-ins as it updates them—usually within a year of the last release. Of course, if you aren't the patient type and are looking for some instant OS X satis- faction, there are a number of OS X options already available. For example, Procreate (800/772-6735, www.procreate.com) began shipping its masking tool, KnockOut 2, and its suite of image filters, KPT Effects, last year. Likewise, Auto FX Software (205/ 980-0056, www.autofx.com) has released OS X versions of two of its plug-in suites— Dreamsuite 1.10, and Photo/Graphic Edges 5.0—with its color-correction software, AutoEye, soon to follow. With Adobe at last making a full commitment to Apple's new operating system, more and more third-party plug-in developers will begin making the switch as well. Until then, if there's a particular Photoshop plug-in you just can't work without, you'll need to backtrack to OS 9.—kELLY LUNSFORD shortcuts in Photoshop, the program lacks a good red- eye reduction filter similar to the one in Photoshop Elements, and it has no resizable previews in filter dia- log boxes (or in the Variations window). Photoshop's effects filters remain unchanged and static, despite the introduction of equivalent dynamic filters in Adobe After Effects several years ago. (As a result, a growing number of motion designers use After Effects for their still-image work.) But in the end, most of these are quibbles for the hard-core Photoshop geek. For most users, Photo- shop 7.0 offers enough new features—OS X support; the rewritten paint engine, with its innovative Heal- ing brush and “natural media” feel; the integrated File Browser feature and new workspace tools; Apple- Script support; and small but important Web- productivity enhancements—to make upgrading more than worthwhile. DEKE McCLELLAND is the author of the award-winning Macworld Photoshop Bible (Hungry Minds, 2000). He is also host of the 12:part video series Total Training for Adobe Photoshop (Total Training, 1999). KELLY LUNSFORD is a Macworld associate editor, and she teaches Web design at the University of California at Berkeley. IMAGE COURTESY OF BERT MONRO REVIEWS Reviews you can trust: Macworld rates only final shipping products, not prototypes. What we review is what you can actually buy. ADOBE PHOTOSHOP 7 New Features for Every User BY BRUCE FRASER AND BENLONG ‘Adobe Photoshop is now 12 years old—in software years, that makes it at least an octoge- narian, It has a depth and matu- rity that few other applications can match, and its latest itera tion, Photoshop 7, not only offers Mac OS X support but also makes the program even more helpful for OS 9 and OS X users alike. Digital photogra- phers and fine artists will be pleased with Photoshop 7’s orga- nizing and painting features, and longtime Photoshop users will find this upgrade essential. The OS X Question Photoshop 7's most significant attribute is that it runs natively in OS X. Given this, you may guess that the interface has changed greatly, but it hasn’t—you'll find the familiar palettes, toolbar, menus, and shortcuts. However, Image Editor Emerges for Mac OS X, Provides Handy a welcome addition in Photoshop 7 is the ability to rename a layer or channel simply by clicking on its name in its respective palette and then typing—much easier than the option-double-click routine required in previous ver- sions. And even though it may take you a while to get used to looking for the Preferences option in the Photoshop applica- tion menu rather than in the Edit menu, Photoshop 7 looks and feels like the Photoshop you've come to know and love. Photoshop 7 rans almost as fast under OS X as it does under OS 9, and in our quantitative tests, we found that actual speed differences were slight. If you're in a high-volume production sit- uation where you're running automated batch operations, you may be better off sticking with OS 9, to reap the accumulated speed benefits. But if you're working interactively and using a Asa — = 9 aes ee Ca Fine Art Photoshop 7's painting engine provides very fine control over brush shape, texture, color, and many other characteristics. A preview based on your selec- tions appears at the bottom of the Brushes palette so you know what to expect. any Mac upward of a 933MHz or dual-500MHz Power Mac G4, the speed difference will likely be trivial. We performed stan- dard operations such as Gaussian Blur, rotating, and resizing on a 100MB image, and the differ- ence in elapsed time between OS 9 and OS X was generally only a couple of seconds. Of course, there are other rea- sons, besides speed, to choose OS X; among them are improved system stability and the ability to run other applications concur- rently with almost no negative impact on performance. When we compared Photo- shop 7 with Photoshop 6.0.1, both running in OS 9, we found that version 7 runs as fast as, and in some cases faster than, its predecessor. Mode changes, for example, are dramatically faster in Photoshop 7, mainly because they have been optimized for AltiVec acceleration, which was left out of Photoshop 6. But for the most part, when running in OS 9, Photoshop 7 doesn’t offer any major speed advantages over Photoshop 6. Photoshop Produc Even given negligible speed dif- ferences, you can still work faster in Photoshop 7 than you could in Photoshop 6, especially using two new features in Photoshop 7 that have an enormous positive impact on productivity: Work- spaces and Tool Presets. Unless you're lucky enough to have a dual-monitor setup, you probably spend a good deal of time rearranging palettes in Photoshop. The new Workspace feature helps reduce the amount of time wasted on this activity; it lets you name and save different arrangements of palettes, includ- ing the current configuration of the Info palette. Saved work- spaces appear on the Workspace submenu of the Window menu, so you can recall them quickly and easily, For example, when you're working on text layers, you usually need access to the Char- acter and Paragraph palettes, but the rest of the time those palettes just take up valuable screen real estate. But if you save a work- space, you can bring up the Char- acter and Paragraph palettes while hiding, say, the Actions and History palettes with a single menu command. Equally valuable is the new Tool Presets palette, which lets you name and save settings for any tool and then recall the set- tings with a single click. For example, you can make presets for the Crop tool that crop an image to 4 by 5 inches or 8 by 10 inches at 360 pixels per inch for ink-jet prints, and 4 by 5 inches or 8 by 10 inches at 266 pixels per inch for offset printing. This is much faster than typing num- bers into the Options bar every time you use the Crop tool. Find What You Need Photoshop 7 also offers a new feature, the File Browser, that lets you find and organize your files much better than OS X°s limiting Open dialog box. Photoshop's new File Browser means that you may never have to visit the Open dialog box again (see “Browse with Abandon”). Like digital-asset_ managers Canto Cumulus and Extensis Portfolio, the File Browser shows you your volumes, fold- ers, and subfolders, and it dis- plays previews of the images contained therein. You can select one or more thumbnail previews and then double-click to open the actual images. But there’s more to the File Browser. You can move files by dragging them to a different folder or volume in the hierar- chical-folder panel at the left of the Browser window, delete them by selecting them and pressing the delete key (which OUTSTANDING: $$$ VERY GOOD: $66% GOOD: $%% FLAWED: §@ UNACCEPTABLE: § Browse with Abandon The new File Browser not only lets you see your images and open them by double-clicking, but also lets you move, delete, organize, and rename them. At the lower left is the metadata for the currently selected image. moves them to the Trash), or rename them by clicking on the file name and typing a new name. For those pesky digital-camera files with obscure default names, you can use the File Browser’s Batch Rename feature to change the names “DC$00710.TIF” through “DCS00950.TIE” to something more descriptive, such as “Dahlias 001” through “Dahlias 024.” ‘The File Browser also lets you mark images for rotation, and Photoshop will apply that rota tion when you open the image. You can sort images by file name, resolution, width, height, file size, copyright information, color profile, or creation and modification dates. You can also rank them from A to E, either by selecting a single image and typ- ing the desired ranking in the Rank field or by selecting one or more images and choosing the desired ranking from the con- text-sensitive menu. This can be convenient if you want to see RATING: $9862 PROS: Healing brush, File Browser, and Auto Color are huge time-savers; powerful new painting engine; numer- ous small interface improvements. CONS: Lack of text import makes Check Spelling command less useful; changes to TIFF and PSD support may cause confusion. PRICE: $609; upgrade from previous versions, $149 0S COMPATIBILITY: Mac 05 9, Mac 0S X COMPANY: Adobe Systems, www.adobe.com, 800/833-6687 ImageReady 7 ‘As with previous versions of Photoshop, Adobe has chosen to place many of its Web-authoring features in ImageReady, a separate, bundled applica- tion that has also been upgraded for this release. (Users of the last release might be a bit surprised to see that ImageReady is now at version 7. Don't worry—you didn’t miss out on versions 4, 5, and 6. Adobe has simply opted to match ImageReady’s version number to Photoshop’s.) Because ImageReady includes all of the same exporting and Save For Web features as Photoshop, the new version has been upgraded with all of Photoshop 7's image-exporting enhancements (see “Photoshop on the Web"). Unfortunately, though, it lacks a notable new feature introduced in Photoshop 7: implementing the File Browser in ImageReady, too, would have made sense. The biggest addition to ImageReady 7 is the improved Rollovers palette, which works in concert with the Layers palette to create JavaScript rollovers and is now much easier to navigate. You can use the Rollovers palette to automatically slice your document and create rollover states for each slice. Say, for example, that you have a Web page with a tabbed menu, and as you roll over each tab, you want a graphic on another part of the page to change. In Photoshop, you create each tab and each separate graphic on its own layer. Then, using ImageReady, select each tab layer and click on the Create Layer-Based Rollover button in the Rollovers palette. ImageReady will create a slice for each layer and allow you to create a separate state for every user action—mousing over, down, up, and so on. Then, to see each state, you can use the helpful, expandable drop-down menus. ‘As in ImageReady 3, you can click on a state in the Rollovers palette and then configure your Layers palette to define the settings for that state. ‘Adobe has done a good job with the Rollovers palette, but it can take a while to remember that the Rollovers palette affects the state of your Layers palette. If you realize that the opacity on several of your layers has suddenly changed, it might be that you've clicked your document over to a different rollover state. It would be nice if Adobe could devise some kind of visual cue to remind the user that the Layers and Rollovers palettes are tied together. ImageReady 7 also provides support for data-driven graphics, using the same approach that was introduced in Illustrator 10 (#866; Reviews, March 2002). Using the Layers palette, you can configure graphic elements as variables and then replace those elements with data grabbed from an ODBC-compliant server. ‘As with previous versions, Adobe has engineered good integration between Photoshop and ImageReady. In Photoshop, you can simply click on the Jump To ImageReady button at the bottom of the main tool palette to open your document in ImageReady. The file stays open in Photoshop, and any changes that you make in ImageReady are automatically reflected in Photoshop. ‘Adobe's division of labor among separate applications may seem a little bulky when compared with a product such as Macromedia Fireworks, which offers vector and bitmapped painting, as well as animation and JavaScript- authoring tools. However, when you factor in Photoshop's superior interface and its raw image-processing power, Adobe's approach, though much more expensive, makes sense, and ImageReady 7 is a valuable upgrade for users who regularly use Photoshop for Web development. Auto Color Me Beautiful Auto Color provides a quick but precise means of setting basic tone and color. The initial image (left) would require considerable work with levels and individual channel curves before you saw anything close to reasonable tone and color. Using its default settings, Auto Color improves the image (center), but the contrast is still too high, and the color balance is too cold. With three very quick tweaks, we set highlight clipping to 0.01 percent, set shadow clipping to 0.00 percent (shadows were already dark enough), and adjusted the midtone target color until the clouds appeared neutral, which required increasing the red and decreasing the blue (right). The image updates in real time as you change the settings, and you can check the numbers on the Info palette while the various dialog boxes are open. only your best or favorite images, to which you might assign an “A” rank, for example. The File Browser doesn’t let you perform the kinds of sophisti- cated searches you can perform in a dedicated digital-asset man- ager, but it has all the features most users are likely to need. Last but not least, the File Browser displays metadata—lit- erally, data about data—that’s embedded in the images, includ- ing Photoshop’s File Info, EXIF (Exchangeable Image Format) data embedded by many digital cameras, and information that Photoshop extracts, such as file format, resolution, width and height, color mode, bit depth, and color profile. We encountered only one problem when using the File Browser’s metadata support. We've yet to see a camera that captures sRGB, but many cam- eras that embed EXIF metadata incorrectly tag photos as sRGB. Photoshop honors this tag and opens the image as sRGB. If the camera software also embeds an ICC profile, Photoshop honors the profile over the EXIF tag, but in the case of at least one camera, the Nikon DIX, it embeds the correct profile in TIFF files but fails to do so in JPEG files. As a result, even if you've set the cam- eras software to convert images to Adobe RGB, if you save them as JPEG files, they'll get the sRGB tag. This isn’t Photoshop's fault—it’s a problem for the cam- era vendors to solve—but it’s something to watch for. Heal It, Patch It Retouching an image—spot- ting out defects such as dust, scratches, or digital-camera arti- facts, or removing moles, scars, and wrinkles—has always been a tedious process. With the Clone Stamp tool, which remains in Photoshop 7, it’s easy to move pixels from another area to cover a blemish, but it’s also easy to produce an unnatural-looking result when the textures don’t match, particularly around the edge of the repair. One hard-won solution is to be very careful with your selection of source points, brush hardness, opacity, and use of the blending mode, but the new Healing brush produces What about My Plug-Ins? Third-party plug-ins that work with Photoshop 6 should also work with Photoshop 7 when i's running in OS 9 or in OS X's Classic mode. But when you run Photoshop 7 in OS X, you need plug-ins that have been updated specifically for OS X—non-native plug-ins won't even appear in the menus. A good number of 0S X-native plug-ins are already available, including Alien Skin Software's EyeCandy 4000 ($862; Reviews, February 2001) and Auto FX Software's DreamSuite (8888; Reviews, March 2002), and plenty more are on the way. But if your work relies on a particular plug-in that hasn't yet been updated, you'll need to stick with running Photoshop in OS 9 for a litle longer. seamless repairs with a minimum of fuss in much less time. ‘The Healing brush works by first making a Clone Stamp tool edit and then taking the result of that edit and blending it seam- lessly into the surrounding tex- ture in a way that’s simply impossible to replicate using the older tools. Using hard brushes seems to work somewhat better than using soft ones, but you can be much more casual about selecting the source point when you're using the Healing brush than you ever could with the Clone Stamp tool. For quick fixes on larger areas, Photoshop 7 offers the Patch tool, which shares a slot in the Tool palette with the Healing brush, To use it, just select the area you want to correct, choose the Patch tool, drag the selection to an area that has the approxi- mate color and texture you want in the repair, and presto, you're done. If you spend a lot of time doing retouching work, the Healing brush and Patch tools alone are worth the price of the upgrade, (For more on the Heal- ing brush, see “The Wait Is Over,” April 2002.) Auto Color In the past, Photoshop's various autocorrections have not been very accurate or finely controlled, but the new Auto Color option has real potential for making ini- tial corrections for tone and color. We say potential because if you use it with its default settings, you'll likely wind up with rather harsh, contrasty results (see “Auto Color Me Beautiful”). The beauty of Auto Color is that you can tweak the settings interac- tively and very quickly obtain good tone and color balance without fiddling with individual channels’ levels and curves (for tips, see “Master Photoshop 7,” elsewhere in this issue). Just Like the Real Thing Removing the Brushes palette was one of the few unpopular moves Adobe made with Photo- shop 6. Many users clamored to get it back, and the Photoshop team reinstated it as a much- enhanced feature. A boon for fine artists, the new painting engine doesn’t provide the wealth of natural-media brushes offered by Procreate’s Painter 7 ($666; Reviews, December 2001), but it offers most of the tools you’d need to build those brushes, and it comes with a healthy collection of presets for various brush types both natural and unnatural. The variety of brush options may be bewildering at first, but as you adjust each brush stroke, the preview area at the bottom of the palette shows you the result (see “Fine Art”). Graphics-tablet support has also been beefed up: Photoshop’s brushes now respond not only to stylus pres sure but also, with suitably equipped styluses, to tilt and thumbwheel control, each of which you can set to control a large variety of brush parameters. The More Things Change... Photoshop 7’s lack of new color- management features could be called a feature in itself. Photo- shop 5 and 6 both introduced sweeping changes in the way the application handled color, and the general that Photoshop 6 got color manage- ment right, so Photoshop 7 leaves well enough alone. The one major fix is largely invisible to the user—the Adobe Color Engine has been revamped to address a problematic situation that occurred with some CMYK pro- files, where using dithering on 8- bit-per-channel images resulted in a “scum dot” (1 percent ink in one or more channels) instead of paper white. consensus was Photoshop on the Web Though Photoshop’s new tools and interface improvements will ease the graphics chores of all Photoshop users, version 7 builds on Photoshop 6% export facilities for Web-graphics creation. The first of these improve- ments is the ability to define one or more colors in a GIF or PNG- 8 graphic as transparent. In the Save For Web dialog box, you can now tag any color as transparent simply by clicking on its color swatch and then clicking on the new Transparency button. This is a very simple mechanism that allows you to make any color transparent (and later remove that transparency) without affect- ing the colors in your original file. GIF files don’t support partial transparency, but Adobe has come up with a clever work- around that lets you create the effect of partial transparency. If you select Transparency Dither in the Save For Web dialog box, Photoshop will render transpar- ent colors in your graphic as a dithered pattern of color and transparent pixels. If you select a matte color—say, the back- ground color of your target Web page—Photoshop will mix some of that color into the dither pat- tern to better blend your graphic into the background. Though this is a clever idea, the chunky, bitmapped-looking results leave a lot to be desired. Photoshop 7 retains its prede- cessor’s facility for remapping color values when exporting a GIF image, but it improves on If you're used to thinking of PSD files as including layers and TIFF files as flattened, Photoshop 7's changes to the these file formats could cause you grief. In Photoshop 6, Adobe introduced the ability to save layers and vector data in TIFF files, but it hid the options behind a Prefer- ences setting. In Photoshop 7, all the TIFF options are enabled by default, so anything you can save in a PSD file—layers, vectors, spot channels, alpha channels, ‘transparency, and annotations—you can save in a TIFF. You can also choose several different compression options for a TIFF, including LZW, ZIP, and JPEG But just because you can save all those elements in a TIFF doesn't mean that applications other than Photo- shop can understand them. Layers included in TIFFs don't seem to present a problem, because other applications ignore the layers and read the flattened composite that is always saved in a TIFF. But vector data will get rasterized, and we don’t know of any application other than Photo- shop that understands ZIP- or JPEG-compressed TIFFs, or spot colors in TIFFs. You need to be aware of the capabili- ties of the application that will next open the file, and plan accordingly. The reason for the changes is commendable—Adobe's goal is a single-file workflow, where one file will contain Fun with File Formats all the Photoshop information in editable form, yet can be placed in page-layout or illustration applications, so you don't have to save both a flat file and a layered ‘one. But it's going to take a while for other applications to rev up their TIFF support. Photoshop 7 also makes it quite difficult to save PSD files without including a flattened composite, so if your image is just a background with adjustment layers, adding the flattened composite doubles the file size. There are two reasons that Adobe tries to force you to save a composite in a PSD. One is to let appli- cations that claim to read Photoshop files (such as InDesign) interpret the image correctly, because they actually read only the flattened composite. The other is to guard against future changes in Photoshop's layer-blending logic—the idea is to make sure that future versions of Photoshop can retrieve the correct appearance from the composite. If neither of these applies to you, it's perfectly safe to turn off the Always Maximize Compatibility For Photoshop (PSD) Files option (in the File Handling section of the Preferences dialog box) and ignore the scary warning that Photo- shop insists on showing you every time you save a PSD without a composite. these features by letting you automatically favor the colors of text layers or vector graphics lay- ers. For example, if you tell Photoshop to weight its color reduction in favor of any text lay- ers, then the colors of those lay- ers will be more accurate. For ensuring color fidelity in logos and other corporate imagery, this is a great feature. You can also choose to favor a particular channel, such as an alpha channel. For example, if you want to prioritize the colors of a specific element in your image, you can create an alpha- channel mask of that area and tell Photoshop to weight its color reduction in favor of the colors within that mask. Before, doing these sorts of optimiza- tions required maniacal adjust- ment of individual colors within a graphic’s palette. Photoshop 6 added some handy Web features that let designers do many basic Web- authoring tasks—slicing, assign ing URLs, naming files, and so on—within Photoshop, while a graphic being created. Photoshop 7's enhancements, along with the upgraded Image- Ready (see “ImageReady 7”), provide a practical set of Web tools. But these features are no replacement for a full-fledged was Web-authoring tool. They pro- vide exactly the utilities you need to create Web-ready images. Sundry Improvements. Adobe threw in a few other minor features to improve the already efficient workflow. Photoshop 7 is scriptable, using either Apple- Script or, for cross-platform applications, JavaScript. Scripting support is relevant even to users whose eyes glaze over at the mere mention of scripts or macros— besides creating your own scripts, you can expect to see plenty of useful scripts developed by the scripting-inclined among us. The new Check Spelling command does a credible job of checking spelling on words you type in Photoshop 7. The Find And Replace Text feature also performs as claimed, but we’d find both features a lot more useful if Photoshop let us import text through a better mechanism than copy and paste. Other enhancements include significant reworking of the Liquify and Picture Package features, support for PDF secu- rity, anew PatternMaker plug-in, and support for Adobe’s XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) schema, which may one day do for workflow automation what PostScript did for page layout. Documentation and Support Photoshop 7 comes with a printed manual and HTML- based online help. The printed manual is considerably better than the one that accompanied Photoshop 6, with improved ref- erence information. The online help has more detailed informa- tion, but it’s not very deep. Free (but not toll-free) tele- phone technical support is avail- able for 90 days from the date of your first call, for new pur- chases (30 days for upgrades). After that, you pay for support (through Adobe, from selected third-party help providers)—you pay a $25 fee, but only after the issue is resolved to your satisfac- tion. Adobe’s Web site also offers a searchable help database, and a wonderful resource in the form of the User-to-User forum. Macworld’s Buying Advice Photoshop 7 is quite simply the best version of Photoshop ever. With the File Browser, the Heal- ing brush, and the Painting Engine, Photoshop 7 provides something new and useful for just about every user, and the $149 upgrade price is less than the cost of many third-party plug-ins. If you use Photoshop more than a few hours a week, you must have Photoshop 7. Focus Your Skills with Our Expert Tips ay | BEN WILLMORE Adobe Photoshop 7 (800/833-6687, www.adobe.com) may not have as many significant changes as previous upgrades, but it'll still give you a lot to get accustomed to. Our guide will help you explore Photoshop's new features and take advan- tage of the program’s improvements. For more on Photoshop 7, see “The Wait Is Over” (April 2002) and our review of the pro- gram (Reviews, elsewhere in this issue). Improve the New Photoshop's new features can boost your creativity and efficiency, but they’re not perfect out of the box. Here’s how to maximize their performance. Patch It Up The Patch tool can do wonders when retouching faces or getting rid of dust and scratches, but its results are often a little too dark. To remedy this, choose Edit: Fade and lower the tool’s opacity setting. Heal It Thyself Though the Heal- ing brush provides the Patch tool’s smart blending, it samples texture in much the same way that version 6’s Clone Stamp tool did. Getting a good sample texture can be difficult if your source image lacks a clean area with the proper type of texture. In such cases, try selecting the Pat- tern option in the Options bar—this applies a pattern’s texture to fix flaws instead of using the texture within the source image. When the Healing brush can’t repair a problem area, you may have to replace the underlying image completely instead of blend- ing the patched information into it. Simply go to the Options bar and change the brush’s mode from Normal to Replace. Just Browsing The File Browser (File: Browse) lets you easily find and manage files. The first thing I do after opening the File Browser is hide my palettes by pressing the tab key. Then I use the following key commands to navigate through my hard drive: the up and down arrows to move between folders, the right arrow to open a folder, and the left arrow to close it. After clicking on a file name, you can move from file to file by press- ing tab to go forward and shift-tab to go backward. Click on the back- to-back arrows at the bottom of the dialog box to hide the three panes on the left of the dialog box. Sometimes the File Browser won't show a mounted CD. To make the CD visible, choose Refresh Desktop View from File Browser’s side menu. Preset Time Saver The new Tool Presets feature (Window: Tool Pre- sets) lets you customize and save tool settings for your specific needs. Tuse Tool Presets in many ways: for example, to store my favorite set- tings for the Crop tool (such as 3 by 5 inches at 300 ppi), to include my foreground color with my brushes, and to make consistent interface elements using the shape tools (you can use Tool Presets to save a color and style). You can access the pre- sets via the Tool Presets palette or by clicking on the tool icon at the far left of the Options bar. Correct Color The new Auto Color feature attempts to automate color correction, but it tends to blow out the highlights on some photos. You can prevent that by fine-tuning its settings. Choose Image: Adjustments: Levels, and click on the Options button. Blown- out highlights happen when clip val- ues are set too high. I recommend changing both clip values to 0.05 percent. While you’re at it, choose Find Dark And Light Colors and select the Snap Neutral Midtones option. Finally, click on the high- light color and choose H:0, S:0, and B:96 so the bright areas of your image don’t become pure white. Make a Pattern If you've been creating patterns (for backgrounds or other purposes) the painstak- ingly manual way, version 7’s Pat- tern Maker tool (in the Filter menu) will seem promising. But after experimenting with Pattern Maker, I’m back to the manual method because Pattern Maker adds obvious seams when it tiles textures I’ve created. You can turn a photo into a pattern that includes many of the photo’s colors, but the pattern usually looks nothing like the original photo. If you’re determined to use Pat- tern Maker when tiling, try increasing the Smoothness setting. If Pattern Maker chops up a photo’s objects beyond recogni- tion, bring the Sample Detail setting up a bit. Or limit yourself to certain kinds of images: I’ve found that Pattern Maker works best on images with a lot of sharp- edged detail. FRAG Sy he zs 2] 4 Fi 2 = 7) a EA a) 3, 2 pid Brush Up When editing images with the Healing brush, you can sample texture from the source or from patterns. Brush Up on Brushes Photoshop's new Brushes palette lets you create everything from grass to a sponge effect in seconds. With more than 50 new options, using brushes effectively can be a challenge, but once you understand a few key terms—Jitter, Minimum, and Con- trol—it becomes easier. In general, Jitter settings vary a brush’s dynamic elements ran- domly; for example, Size Jitter varies the size of your brush while you paint. Minimum determines how small Photoshop can scale a brush; for instance, a Minimum setting of 30 percent lets the pro- gram use any amount between 30 TILUSTRATION BY STUART BRADFORD RE Spot showcase he Spot showcase 7 veeRreoy and 100 percent of the currently selected brush size. Control deter- mines when these changes happen. When Control is set to Off, Jit- ter controls when changes will happen. Other options in the Con- trol menu relate to pressure-sensi- tive graphics tablets. With those selected, Photoshop bases the vari- ations on how hard you press down with the pen (no Jitter setting is necessary). Dual Brushes Another feature can radically transform the look of your brush: the Dual Brush option. It combines two brush tips so that the primary brush limits where the second brush can affect the image, effectively cropping it. Choose your primary brush shape from the Brush Tip Shape menu; then select the Dual Brush option and select a second brush. To control how the brushes interact, experi- ment with Dual Brush’s Spacing and Mode settings. Brush Previews By default, the Brushes palette shows you a small version of the selected brush, with a stroke preview to its right. I love this preview, but a standard-size palette fits only eight brushes. If you select Small Thumbnail from the palette’s side menu, almost 50 brushes are displayed in the same space. To get a stroke preview for a brush, just pause over its thumbnail until a yellow tool tip appears. Switch Brush Shortcuts Switching brushes in Photoshop 6.0.1 is easy: press the enter key when any paint- ing tool is active, and the Brushes palette opens by your cursor. Before version 6.0.1, pressing enter activated the first option high- lighted in the Options bar. In ver- sion 7, Adobe has returned this key command to its roots. But you can still get your brush presets to show up next to your cursor by holding down the control key and clicking your mouse button. Super Tweaks In addition to adding new features, Adobe has refined many of Photo- shop’s existing tools. With a little help, you can make the most of these updates. Blending Modes There are five new blending modes, and the Modes menu is now divided into six categories: Generic, Darken, Lighten, Contrast, Comparative, and Limiting. Although these divisions are a step in the right direction, the names’ meanings aren’t immedi- ately clear. In the Generic grouping, Nor- mal, Dissolve, and Behind are carryovers from version 6; Clear, which makes pixels transparent, is new. As their category name implies, the Darken modes darken colors. In this category, Adobe has added Linear Burn, which deliv- ers higher-contrast results than the familiar Multiply mode. A new Lighten mode is Linear Dodge, which produces higher contrasts than the Screen mode. ‘The Contrast modes are a little more complex. When your blend color is lighter than 50 percent gray, the Contrast modes (including newcomers Vivid Light, Linear Gray, and Pin Light) lighten the image. When your blend color is darker than 50 percent gray, they darken the image. Vivid Light is a combination of the Color Dodge and Color Burn modes. Linear Light is a combination of Linear Dodge and Linear Burn. And Pin Light is a combination of Lighten and Darken modes. The two new Comparative modes, Difference and Exclusion, help you line up layers: the on- screen blend results turn black MASTER PHOTOSHOP7 when you match the active layer to an underlying one. ‘The Limiting modes apply a par- ticular quality of the active layer (color, saturation, and so on) to the underlying image. Editing Document Presets “The File: New dialog box now contains preset document sizes, but you’ll find only the most-common dimensions. To add your own pre- sets, open the New Doc Sizes.txt file (Photoshop: Presets) in a word Di processor, follow the directions contained therein, and then save the file in text-only format in the same location. Layers Adobe has made several changes to the way layers—and the Layers palette—work in Photo- shop. Because layers are such an integral part of the program, these improvements should have an immediate effect on your ability to use Photoshop more efficiently. Delete Layers The new Delete Hidden Layers command (in either the Layers menu or the side menu of the Layers palette) helps those of us who keep layers that don’t make it to the final composition. You can also now delete all the layers that are linked together by choos- ing Layer: Delete Linked or by Around® @ @ @ 38-clicking on the Trash icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Fill on the Move The Fill Opac- ity setting is now at the top of the Layers palette. It lets you hide the contents of a layer while keep- ing any layer effects (such as bevel and emboss) at full strength. In Photoshop 6, you had to double- click on a layer to find the Fill Opacity setting. Name Change In Photoshop 6, Adobe introduced Layer Clipping from the pop-up menu at the bot- tom of the image. Illustrator and Photoshop If you run OS X and copy and paste from Illustrator 10 to Photoshop 7, you’re in for a surprise. In the past, when you copied an object from Illustrator, Photoshop asked whether it should paste the object as pixels, a path, or a Shape layer. Illustrator 10 uses PDF as its clipboard format, which Photo- shop imports as PDF. To restore ‘Custom CMYK | Ink Options Ink Colors: | SWOP (Coated) iz) Dot Gain: | Standard [#] [20 |% Name: |SWOP (Coated), 20%, CCR, Medium | (Gancel) -— Separation Options Separation Type: @GCR Q UCR Black Generation: Medium _[#) Black Ink Limit: [100 Total Ink Limit: |400 UCA Amount: |0 Gray Ramp: Z, — ‘@ Anew link symbol in the Shape tools tracks the last layer style you've used and can apply that style to additional shapes. Paths, which let you use the Shape tools to hide parts of a layer. The fea- ture remains, but it’s now known as Vector Mask. Relative Canvas Size If you've ever had to add, for example, 0.375 inches to an image that was already 4.928 inches wide, you probably used a calculator to add those numbers and then entered the sum in the Canvas Size dialog box. Now you can trash that calcu- lator—the new Relative option lets you enter the amount of space you'd like to add to your docu- ment’s dimensions, instead of the total width you desire. Dimension Display You can dis- play an image’s dimensions at the bottom of a document window by choosing Document Dimensions the pasting options, launch IIlus- trator, go into your Files & Clip- board preferences, and activate the AICB option. The Last Word When a core program such as Adobe Photoshop undergoes sig- nificant changes, there are usually trade-offs: before you learn how to use improvements and enhance- ments, they can make a program seem awkward and uncomfortable. But with this guide (and a little practice), Photoshop 7 will soon be as cozy and familiar as your favorite pair of jeans. 1 BEN WILLMORE is the founder of Digital Mastery a training and consulting firm (wwwdigitalmastery.com), and the author of Adobe Photoshop 6.0 Studio Techniques (Adobe Press, 2001). IRLUSTRATION BY MARK DANIELSON BRUCE FRASER SECRETS Editing Images | n Photoshop Whether they come from a scan- ner or a digital camera, most digi- tal images need to be edited in three ways: you must optimize the dynamic range, correct the color balance, and optimize the contrast. You can quickly do all three using the Levels and Curves tools in Photoshop. Optimize Dynamic Range Scan- ners and cameras can capture a much wider dynamic range than any one printer can reproduce. ‘To get the best possible print, make sure your images use the whole dynamic range of your output. To do so, open Photo- shop’s Levels palette (Image: Adjustments) and move the black and white input sliders in to the start of the “hill” where the data appears. You can also hold down the option key to see what part of the dynamic range, if any, is clipped as you move the sliders. Correct Color Balance Most unedited images have a color cast—they appear too red, too blue, or (like the left-hand image in “Green around the Gills”), too green. The easiest way to fix color-balance problems is to find something in the image that you know should be close to a neutral gray, and then use curves to make the R, G, and B values for that point equal. Do that, and the rest of the color will fall into place. ‘To begin correcting the color balance, open the Curves palette (Image: Adjustment), and then move the cursor to an area that should be neutral gray. (In this case, I chose the water. Other likely candidates are clouds, gray stone, and shadows.) Next, $-shift- click to place a point on each of the individual chan- nel curves. For this image, the original values in the Info panel were R: 147, G: 189, and B: 195. I left the G channel alone, as it has the middle value, and bal- anced the R and B channels to the G value. I pressed %-1 (one) to switch to the R channel, pressed the tab key twice to select the output field, and entered 189 (the target value I obtained from the G channel). Then I pressed #-3 to switch to the B channel, Green around the Gills A few basic Photoshop techniques take this image from overly green (left) to a good likeness (right). pressed tab twice to highlight the output field, and again entered the target value of 189. The “after” values in the Info palette read R: 189, G: 189, and B: 189, indicating a neutral gray. As you can see in the right-hand image in “Green around the Gills,” the color cast largely disappeared. On some images, you may need to choose more than one point to correct, but you rarely need more than three: one in the midtones, one in the quarter tones, and one in the three-quarter tones. Optimize Contrast ‘To make a subject snap, you usually need to add contrast by making an S-shaped curve in the Curves’ composite RGB channel. Press 38-~ (tilde) to switch to the composite channel, 3- click in the image on a bright area that you want to emphasize, and $-click again on a dark area. This places two control points on the composite curve. Move the point for the bright area upward and to the left, and the point for the dark area down and to the right, until the contrast looks right. You can select different points on the curve by pressing control-tab to move from one to the next, and use the arrow keys to move the selected point up, down, left, and right. With a little practice, you can do this in much less time than it takes to explain. ILLUSTRATION BY MARK DANIELSON SECRETS | PRINT PUBLISHING | UBESS ING) BY DAVID BLATNER Master Photoshop's Vectors Thanks to the introduction of vector tools in Adobe Photoshop, you can now combine sharp-edged vector artwork with antialiased bitmaps to cre- ate extraordinary results. Here’s how to get the most out of Photoshop's vector tools while avoiding common pitfalls. Layer Clipping Paths ‘There’s a common misconception that Photoshop 6 lets you draw vector artwork in a document. Actu- ally, every vector shape you create in Photoshop— excluding type—is just a layer clipping path that has been applied to a bitmap layer (often filled with a solid color). Layer clipping paths perform the same function as layer masks—that is, they mask out some pixels and leave others visible. But while layer masks can be soft-edged, layer clipping paths always use a hard-edged line. And because the path is a vector, the line always matches the resolution of your PostScript printer. Applying Vector Paths to Bitmaps You can apply a layer clipping path to any Photoshop layer. Say you want to place a bit- map of a beach scene inside your corporate logo but retain the logo’s sharp vector edges. You could do this simply by pasting the logo from Adobe Illustrator into Photoshop (when Photo- shop asks, tell it to paste the artwork as a path, not a shape) and then applying those outlines as a layer clipping path to your bitmap. ‘To convert an existing path into a layer clipping path, first select the path in the Paths palette. Choose the layer you want to affect—in this case, your beach scene—and then 38-click on the Add Layer Mask button in the Layers palette. Photo- shop applies the path to the selected layer as a vector-based clipping path. You can then use the Direct Selection tool to edit the path’s shape, revealing more or less of the underlying image. You can even apply layer effects—such as changes to opacity and blending mode, drop shadows, and so on—to your sharp-edged layer. Once you've made a layer clipping path, you'll notice that its thumbnail appears in the Layers palette, looking suspiciously like a layer mask. You can dis- tinguish a layer clipping path from a layer mask, how- ever, by the small black vertical line to the left of the thumbnail (see “Clipping with Vectors”). Using Vectors with Adjustment Layers You can also apply layer clipping paths to adjustment layers—to make your vector logo appear as a duotone over a full- color bitmap, for example. To do this, follow the pre- viously described steps to apply a layer clipping path to a Gradient Map adjustment layer located above the background image. In fact, if you create an adjustment layer while any path is selected in the Paths palette, Photoshop automatically assigns that path as a layer clipping path. Inverting Your Paths One major annoyance you'll encounter in Photoshop is that there’s no easy way to invert a layer clipping path after you’ve added it to a layer. There is, however, a way to do it. With a layer selected, open the Paths palette and select the desired path. Next, select the path in the document window by #-clicking inside the path with the Shape tool (you can also option-click on the path boundary with the Path Selection tool). Finally, click on either the Add To Path Area button or the Subtract From Path Area button (both are in the Options bar). If one doesn’t invert the path, the other will. Laying Bitmaps Over Vectors P've always been fascinated by magazine covers like those you often see on Time or Sports Illustrated, with a bitmapped image of someone’s head overlapping the masthead’s vector artwork. But unless you owned a million-dollar prepress system, there was no way to create this effect on your desktop before Photoshop 6. Compositing the image in QuarkXPress necessi- tated having a harsh clipping path around the per- son’s head—an unattractive option for curly or wispy hair. On the other hand, compositing it in Photo- shop meant losing your text’s sharp, resolution- independent edges. Photoshop's vector tools now give you the best of both worlds—soff, antialiased bitmaps with crisp vector artwork. To produce this effect in Photoshop, position your type layer (or vector logo) above the background image of your subject. With the back- ground layer selected in the Layers palette, make a rough selection around the area of the image you want to overlap the text—in this case, the top of the person’s head—and press #£-J to copy it onto a new layer. In the Layers palette, drag this new layer and place it above the vector layer. Finally, remove any excess pixels from the topmost bitmap layer by adding a layer mask and using the brush tools to paint black over the portions that you don’t want visible. Using a layer mask is bet- ter than simply erasing unwanted portions of the image, because you can paint pixels back in if you make a mistake (by painting the mask with white). What You See Although vectors can greatly simplify the way you work, they don’t come without quirks. For example, while Photoshop always attempts to provide an accu- rate preview, you can’t trust what you see on screen when it comes to vectors. If you magnify the edge of a vector line, you'll notice that the edge appears to be antialiased with the background, even though vec- tors should remain sharp at any magnification. So what’s going on? Photoshop is showing you what the image would look like if you flattened it (losing the vector paths and leaving only pixels). If you want to see how vectors will look when printed on a Post- Script printer, save a copy of your file in the PDF format and open it in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Saving Your Vectors Although Photoshop lets you blend vector and bit- map artwork, getting your image out of Photoshop and onto the printed page isn’t always as easy as it sounds. The key is knowing which file format to use and which options to turn on. Looking Sharp The output quality of your vector art depends on your printer. Vectors are designed to be printed on a PostScript printer (either from Pho- toshop or from your page-layout program). You can print to non-PostScript printers, too, but you might not see the same hard-edged lines. Choosing Your Format If you’re printing your docu- ment from Adobe InDesign, XPress, or some other program, you need to save it out of Photoshop as an EPS, DCS, or PDF file. No other file format supports vector artwork. If you save it as a ‘TIFF or JPEG file, for instance, it may /ook as though the vectors were saved, but in reality, Photoshop has flattened the image into a single layer of pixels—if you're counting on sharp-edged vectors, you'll be disappointed. I prefer saving images with vector artwork in the PDF format, because PDF files are often smaller and print faster. But some programs won't read these files ‘| BeachMagCoverpsd @ 50% (Background RG... En 2 Clipping with = Vectors Photoshop's layer clipping paths give = the illusion of vector = drawings, though they can be added to any layer. The vertical ine in the Layers palette EY indicates that the thumbnail to the right is a layer clipping path rather than a regular layer mask 50% Doc: 146M/4.55M I< WZ properly (for instance, XPress 4.X can’t read PDF files created in Photoshop 6 or 7, although XPress 5.0 can). In those cases, EPS or DCS is best (use DCS 2.0 if your image also contains spot colors). However, it’s important to remember that Photo- shop cannot retain the vectors if you try to reopen an EPS or DCS file in Photoshop—it automatically rasterizes the vectors to pixels. If you use the EPS or DCS format, save the original Photoshop file in a format that does retain the vector artwork when reopened (a native PSD file, for example), just in case. Getting the Word Although Photoshop's type- handling features are almost as powerful as InDesign’s, Photoshop doesn’t save type as efficiently. If you save your layered file in the EPS format, Photoshop saves the type as incredibly complex clipping paths—as though the type were a layer clipping path. The more text there is, the more complex the clipping paths, and the longer your page takes to print. You can avoid this by flattening your file or by dese- lecting the Include Vector Data option in the Save As EPS dialog box. But doing either turns the type into pixels at the resolution of your image (instead of main- taining the resolution-independent vectors). If you need sharp-edged type from Photoshop, and you're not using XPress 4.X, it’s better to use the PDF for- mat, which can save the font information itself instead of converting the text to outlines. Mixing It Up If you're simply placing text or a logo on top of an image, there’s no reason to add it in Photoshop— you'd be better off adding those elements in a page- layout or illustration program. But when you really need vectors and pixels to interact, there’s nothing like using Photoshop's vector tools to do the job. =! Contributing Editor DAVID BLATNER is a coauthor of Real World Photoshop 7 (Peachpit Press, 2002) and Real World InDesign 2 (Peachpit Press, 2002). You can find him at www.moo.com.