Then there's the issue of making and refining selections, the key to Photoshop compositing productivity. Novices will thrill at the Quick Selection tool, essentially a cross between the Magic Wand and a paintbrush, allowing you to interactively paint selections. (It's cute but of limited appeal to advanced artists.) But the Refine Edge dialog is a truly significant way to fine-tune selections, with exquisite controls over the softness and edge characteristics of your current selection, along with a variety of previewing options to evaluate the quality and precision of a selection mask. This one dialog replaces an entire host of complex alpha channel-editing techniques, and it will have an immediate impact on the life of a compositing artist.

Digital photographers will smile at the new goodies in Camera Raw, including Fill Light and Restore, for restoring lightness and density detail in an absolutely wonderful way. We only wish these tools were available within Photoshop itself. If you have JPEG and TIFF files in your collection, you can now process them through Camera Raw, a welcome addition. The Black And White adjustment dialog is a truly superior way to create grayscale images from color sources, delivering more control and better results than Channel Mixer–based techniques (and requiring less work than some of our longtime Calculations-based tricks). It would be perfect if it worked with CMYK source images, but you'll need to convert them to RGB first, a slight inconvenience.

The bottom line. Photoshop CS3 is a natural upgrade for anyone with an Intel Mac and offers enough innovation to satisfy just about anyone currently using it on a daily basis. If you have Photoshop, get CS3. It's that simple.

COMPANY: Adobe

CONTACT: www.adobe.com

PRICE: $649 à la carte, $199 upgrade, $1,199 as part of the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Standard bundle

REQUIREMENTS: G4 or faster or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.4.8 or later, 512MB RAM, 64MB VRAM, 2GB disk space

Smart Filters-tweaking goodness. Universal performance boost. New color-correction tools. Numerous interface tweaks and tool additions. Universal binary.

Confusing pricing and bundling structure.

BONUS REVIEW: Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended

Those who work with video will be interested in the video-processing tools offered in Extended - especially since ImageReady has gone to the big pixel bin in the sky. While some of ImageReady’s functionality has been folded into Photoshop CS3, you’ll need to step up to the Extended version to create animated GIF files.

You can open QuickTime movies in Photoshop and edit them frame by frame, but there are no serious rotoscoping features, such as the ability to interpolate filter settings over time, or cloning/masking with roto-splines or other advanced retouching-over-time techniques. Extended can also import a variety of 3D model formats, and it gives you a 3D paintbrush for creating textures right on the objects, but not all of Photoshop’s painting options and image-processing tools work with the 3D layer.

The bottom line. The additional Extended functionality has a definite 1.0 air, and it will likely undergo serious refinement over the next few versions. Currently, we find it difficult for the average Photoshop user to justify paying more for the Extended version.

COMPANY: Adobe

CONTACT: www.adobe.com

PRICE: $999 à la carte, $349 upgrade, available in four CS3 bundles ($1,699 to $2,499)

REQUIREMENTS: G4 or faster or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.4.8 or later, 512MB RAM, 64MB VRAM, 2GB disk space

Same great functionality as Photoshop CS3 Standard, with additional tools for 3D and video artists. Universal binary.

Extended features need work. Some ImageReady functionality now missing.