First Look: Inside Photoshop CS3
Posted 03/25/2007 at 1:43pm
| by David Biedny
The Face of Photoshop
Once you realize that you're cooking with a hotter flame, you'll immediately notice that the overall look of Photoshop CS3 has gone through some changes. Less is more, and in this case, there's less on the surface and more under the hood.
The Tools palette has gone through a major surgical reduction, slimming down from its familiar two-column girth to a single vertical strip of icons. Accompanying pop-up menus reveal the multiple modes for specific tools, such as the polygonal and magnetic modes for the Lasso tool. This frees up a little room on the screen. Fear not, old dogs, a single mouse click restores the classic two-column format. Then there's the addition of a slim iconic palette that appears next to the floating palettes for Layers, Channels, Info, the Navigator, Swatches, or any of the 21 main entries found in the Windows menu. These can be linked together with the main Tools palette to create an überpalette of all of Photoshop's tools.
Adobe has refined the tabbed windows interface now found in most of its applications. While overall we like the interface addition, some users might find it gratuitous, especially those who have already set up custom actions to open their most often used windows. A more useful change might have been adding the ability to customize the main Tools palette to remove unused features. How many people have ever used the Single Row and Column Marquee tools?
Photoshop CS3's updated interface is a lot more flexible than before. The idea is to allow you to customize it as needed and give more screen real estate to your images.
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