Adobe Photoshop CS3 Impressions - 7 Days-e

7 Days-e [http://7days.kiev.ua/engl/] dear Gadget news at 7 Days Adobe Photoshop CS3 Impressions Performance Just to get it out of the way: the performance is pretty darned solid. It’s noticeably faster than Photoshop CS2 under Rosetta, especially when switching between Photoshop and another app. (And us web developers tend to do a lot of that.) There’s a new ‘Performance’ section of the Preferences that lets you cap the amount of memory available to Photoshop (by default its memory cap is set at 75% of your system memory) and set up scratch disks. The pane also includes information on the GPU on your graphics card, which would imply that CS3 can use your graphics card to handle some tasks, relieving the load on your main processor(s). But just when you think the improved performance is the biggest, most obvious change, that’s when you notice the new user interface. Photoshop CS3 offers the ability to dock palettes on the sides of your screen, which you can expand or collapse to save screen space. When you collapse a palette dock, the palettes inside it are still available as toolbar icons; clicking an icon brings up that one palette, which goes away as soon as you’re done with it. Even the main Photoshop toolbox has gotten a new look: by default it’s arranged in a single vertical column, which frees up some horizontal screen real estate for your images. You can return to the old toolbox style by just clicking it title bar. And in a nice little Mac-like touch, when you switch into or out of Photoshop, the palettes fade in and out smoothly rather than just disappearing and reappearing. Non-Destructive Editing The blockbuster feature of CS3 would seem to be the ability to apply filters non-destructively to Smart Objects. I’ve been really, really wanting Adobe to add some kind of non-destructive filtering to Photoshop for a while now, and it seems odd that it’s taken this long given that After Effects has had it for a while. Unfortunately, Smart Filters can only be applied to Smart Objects, which are external files embedded in your document as opposed to normal layers. But hey, non-destructive filters — I’ll take what I can get. You can apply any filter as a Smart Filter, and even disable and reorder the filters after you’ve applied them. Let’s say you’ve applied Gaussian Blur, but you realize you forgot to apply Color Halftone first. All you have to do is apply the Color Halftone filter to your Smart Object, and then drag its name in the Layers palette so that it’s under the Gaussian Blur. The image immediately updates, with the Gaussian Blur being applied after the Color Halftone. Pretty sweet. You can also change your filters’ settings after you’ve applied them, so if that 10 pixel blur turns out to have been too much (or too little), you can change it on the fly. Animation One thing noticeably absent from the current Photoshop CS3 beta is ImageReady, an app I use maybe once a year when I have to make an animated GIF. Well, it’s possible that ImageReady CS3 is just not ready for the public, but it would seem that Adobe have merged ImageReady and Photoshop, because ImageReady’s Animation palette is now available in Photoshop. Whenever it’s visible, the “Unify” toolbar (for locking the visibility or position of certain layers in all frames of an animation) automagically appears in the Layers palette. Save for Web…And Devices? CS3 comes with a new app, Adobe Device Central, which is intended to make it easy to develop content for mobile devices by providing a micro-sized preview based on the screen size of a given device. Device Central has the first and only obvious bug I could find: it wasn’t able to open the temporary file created by Save For Web when you open Device Central from there. And I’m still not 100% clear on what Device Central does, because its device list seems to include only mobile versions of Flash Player rather than, you know, actual mobile devices. I’m sure that’s useful, but it looks like more work may be required before this thing is ready for prime time. Apart from that, Save For Web now includes some animation controls so you can optimize individual frames of an animated GIF. And Save For Web now automatically converts images into the sRGB color space before optimizing, something a lot of people assumed it was already doing in CS2 that it wasn’t. (You can disable the color space shift by clicking the little triangle button above the optimization settings and unchecking ‘Convert to sRGB’.) Other Useful Stuff There’s a new Auto-Align Layers command which appears to automatically align and position sets of layers based on their content. So if you’ve taken a series of photos that make up a panorama, you just select those layers and auto-align them. There’s also an Auto-Blend Layers command, and I’m not entirely sure yet what it does. Over in the Edit > Adjustments menu, the Curves dialog has been redesigned, and there is now a helpful Presets dropdown for Curves, Brightness/Contrast, Black & White and Channel Mixer. (Was there a Black & White command in CS2? I only ever use the Channel Mixer to change color into B&W, so I’ve never noticed it.) There is now a nifty Quick Selection tool, which is best described as being like a Magic Wand brush. Speaking of selections, in the Select menu there’s now a Refine Edge command that provides a handy one-stop shop for manipulating selection areas, complete with real-time preview. Pointless Aesthetic Quibbling I’ve spent many a blog entry (okay, maybe one or two) complaining about Adobe’s campaign to make the Photoshop icons and branding stupider and uglier with each new release, and CS3 is no exception. I remember the heady days of Photoshop 7, when the icon was a cleaned-up, more photorealistic rendering of the classic eye-and-photo-filter Photoshop logo, and you referred to different versions of the app by their version number rather than by which Creative Suite they’re bundled with. (Photoshop CS3, by the way, is version 10.) I loved that eye-and-filter icon; it told you everything you needed to know about Photoshop in one image. Granted, Photoshop has evolved way past just being a photo editor to become the go-to app for all kinds of professional bitmap editing, but photo manipulation is still the still-beating heart of its feature set. So it remains a mystery to me why Adobe would change the icon to a feather, of all things, in CS and CS2. The feather is pleasant enough, but it communicates nothing. If you look at all the CS/2 icons side by side you certainly get a sense of their family resemblance, true, but without a text label or prior knowledge of which is which, you’d have no idea which one was Photoshop and which one was Illustrator. (I could go on a side rant about Illustrator’s long strange icon trip from the Birth of Venus to the world’s ugliest flower, but I’d rather not dwell on it.) Anyway, in the Photoshop CS3 beta the icons have changed once again. Where once we had an eye-and-filter, and then rainbow-colored feathers, we get…a blue gradient square with the letters “Ps” in Myriad. That certainly does a better job of communicating that this is Photoshop, as opposed to FeatherPro or UglyIconCentral, but it abandons any attempt at communicating what the app is about. In some ways this is a step up — the uninitiated could probably figure this one out a lot more easily than the Feather, and the “Br” icon for Adobe Bridge is a step up from the ugly, vaguely vaginal seashell it used to have. But it just seems like they’re not even trying anymore. What’s more, the manner of their non-effort reeks of Macromedia’s handling of the Studio MX icons after those apps were bundled together back in 2002. Say what you will about the old icons for Dreamweaver, Flash, et al., they used to have some personality, and that was one of the things that defined Macromedia visually as Not Adobe. Adobe’s icons were stately and elegant, while Macromedia’s were wilder and more abstract. Then Studio MX came along, and the icons all changed into…colored spheres with letters on them to denote which one was which. The apps all kept their signature colors (red for Flash, lime green for Dreamweaver, yellow for Fireworks), and I do have to allow that the old icons were sometimes so abstract that nothing important was lost by making it easier to tell which app was which. I guess I mention that to say this: while Macromedia’s icons may have been asking for it, Adobe’s weren’t. Some latter-day Adobe products’ icons, like the InDesign butterfly, may have made no sense, but why not redesign those icons to be more expressive rather than dumb down the ones that were actually working, all in the name of cross-branding? Now, I am aware that this is a beta, and that these icons may not be final. But the design seems suspiciously consistent with the new visual identity first seen on Acrobat 8 Professional, and I’m not sure why Adobe would use a temp icon that is such a departure from the current Photoshop feather if it weren’t intended to be the new identity for the product. Written by bishop on April 6th, 2007 with no comments . Read more articles on Design . [+] Digg : Feature this article [+] Del.icio.us : Bookmark this article [+] Furl : Bookmark this article Related articles BolsiPlus — Add Pockets To Anything (May 10th, 2007) Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 v9.0 Build 3453 (April 23rd, 2007) No comments There are still no comments on this article. Leave your comment Notify a mention to this article (trackback) Subscribe to the comments on this article (RSS) Leave your comment... If you want to leave your comment on this article, simply fill out the next form: Name (required) Email (won't be published) (required) Web page You can use these XHTML tags:

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