Photoshop's interface has been updated, but the biggest improvements are under the hood and nestling in tool palettes.

 

The people on the product team for Photoshop haven't been getting much sleep. We can only imagine how much Red Bull and coffee they consumed in the process of taking Photoshop CS2 to CS3, which Adobe released as a downloadable public beta back in December. The biggest cause for celebration - at least for creatives who bought new Macs in the last year or so - is that Photoshop CS3 runs natively on Intel-based Macs. And, of course, it won't come as a surprise to anyone if, once Photoshop CS3 ships, Apple sees a spike in sales of Mac Pros and MacBook Pros.

 

Whether or not you've downloaded and started working with the CS3 beta, there are likely some features you haven't had the time to try - or simply didn't know existed. To help you merge into the fast track, we offer a guided tour of CS3's most compelling new features: how they work, what they're good for, and in some cases, why we wish Adobe had taken them just a little further. We give you what you need to put CS3 through a more rigorous battery of tests, so you can decide if you want to step up for keeps - or not.

 

Next: The Face of Photoshop

 

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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.

 

Next: The Latest Intel-igence

 

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The Latest Intel-igence

 

Previous versions of Photoshop have worked reasonably well under Rosetta translation. But the fact is that anyone working with images consisting of more than a few layers - especially layers of several megabytes each - has likely experienced performance hits. With Intel-native CS3, the speed increases are significant. For our benchmarks, we used a 17-inch 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM and compared it with a dual 2GHz G5 tower with 2GB of RAM. Our 39MB test image fit completely into RAM on both systems, taking the hard disk access speed out of the equation.

 

Taking into consideration that this is a beta version of CS3, we saw some awesome speed bumps on some operations, while others offered only nominal increases. Your own results may vary.

 

Radial Blur set to zoom effect at Best quality, amount = 30
> PowerPC Mac: 120 seconds
> Intel Mac: 47 seconds
> Speed Increase: 155%

 

Change image size by 500%
> PowerPC Mac: 127 seconds
> Intel Mac: 27 seconds
> Speed Increase: 371%

 

Smart Blur, radius = 10, threshold = 15, quality = High, mode = Normal
> PowerPC Mac: 83 seconds
> Intel Mac: 61 seconds
> Speed Increase: 37%

 

Next: More to Love About Curves

 

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More to Love About Curves

 

Advanced Photoshoppers are well aware of the importance of the Curves control. While there are lots of ways to change image density in Photoshop, none really comes close to the numerical precision of Curves. Even so, many artists rely more on Levels because its dialog features a built-in histogram - a statistical analysis of the brightness levels of all of the pixels in an image or a selection area. Photoshop CS3 adds the histogram to the Curves dialog. We applaud this move, but we wish Adobe had gone one step further and allowed the histogram to update itself on the fly.

 

Color overlays for individual channels and an integrated histogram are welcome additions to the Curves dialog. In this case, we isolated and modified the red channel.

 

Next: More to Love About Curves (continued)

 

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More to Love About Curves (continued)

 

Another Levels capability that has found its way into Curves is a direct way to set the shadow and highlight breakpoints - the absolute darkest and lightest values in the image - by clicking the respective sliders at the bottom of the Curves controls. Also new to Curves is the ability to overlay the individual color channel curves together on the same readout (displayed in their respective channel colors), which is useful when you're doing precision color correction.

 

The shadow and highlight controls (and Command-Option) highlight the locations of clipped areas in the image.

 

As in Levels, you can also see exactly where these shadow and highlight regions fall on the image by pressing the Command and Option keys while clicking either of these controls. This is exactly what you need to determine where you're likely to run into problems when sending a photo to a printer or creating color separations for professional print reproduction.

 

Next: More to Love About Curves (continued)

 

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More to Love About Curves (continued)

 

If you find that you're constantly using a certain set of Curve presets for your work, you'll be thrilled by the addition of a pop-up menu for multiple custom-named presets. Before, all you could do was load and apply one curve setting at a time. This new feature can also be found in the Channel Mixer, but surprisingly, that's the only other spot you'll find it. In a future version, we hope to see Adobe add presets in Levels, Color Balance, and Hue/Saturation.

 

Curves' new presets deliver one-click color correction. Here we used the Cross Process preset.

 

Next: Power Cloning

 

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Power Cloning

 

Retouchers live and die by the ability to clone, and CS3 delivers some cool new tricks. It now has controls for changing the scale, rotation, and offset of the cloned target, and you can create up to five presets for cloning options. Instead of working on your image sight unseen, the clone source can be overlaid on top of your image as you paint, so you can predict exactly what will be applied at any given moment. If the overlay gets in the way, set it to vanish when you're actively painting.

 

 

 

Say good-bye to cloning in the dark with Show Overlay.

 

Next: Filters with Brains

 

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Filters with Brains

 

One of Photoshop CS3's show-stopping new features is also the one that will most directly impact daily production and creative chores. The new Smart Filter implementation addresses one of the longest-standing requests of Photoshop users over the years: the ability to use filters nondestructively, leaving the underlying pixels of an image unaffected by experimentation. Anyone who has used Adjustment Layers in the last few versions of Photoshop is likely familiar with the flexibility of applying color corrections that can be changed at any time without subjecting the pixels to the major stress of reprocessing the color values over and over. The Smart Filters feature extends this notion to the Filter menu, with the notable exceptions of the Liquefy, Extract, Pattern Maker, and Vanishing Point commands (which have never really been treated as standard Photoshop filters in the traditional sense).

 

Get smart. Smart Filters work on a specific selected layer, unlike Adjustment Layers, which apply their color-correction setting to all underlying layers. The layer must first be converted to a Smart Object (a feature introduced in Photoshop CS2), allowing layers to be scaled, rotated, and stretched in a nondestructive fashion. Once you convert the layer, applying a specific filter creates a new entry in the Layers palette. Underneath the processed layer, a white box (representing the layer mask for the filter operations) appears, and the applied filter appears immediately below. You can stack the filters up, and even reorder them by clicking and dragging them to new positions in the stack. A button lets you toggle the filter effect on and off, and an editing button to the right brings up the dialog for that filter when you double-click it. Filter settings can be modified at any time, as long as the image is saved as a Photoshop file.

 

The order of filters in the stack is important - the processing happens bottom to top, with the topmost filter being the last to affect the image. For example, if you plan on sharpening a layer with Unsharp Mask, it should be placed at the top of the filter stack, and always on top of any Blur filter. The area of the layer that is affected by the filters can be controlled via a layer mask, which is displayed in the white box to the left of the Smart Filters label.

 

Five different filters have been applied nondestructively to this image, using Smart Filters.

 

Next: Filters with Brains (continued)

 

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Filters with Brains (continued)

 

Add a layer mask. Holding down the Option key, click the thumbnail for the Smart Filter mask, and you'll see the active document display change - instead of the image, you'll see solid white. Select all (Command-A) and invert the mask (Command-I). Now it's all black. Make a selection with any of the selection tools and, making sure the current foreground color is white, fill the selection with white by pressing Option-Delete. Now Option-click the thumbnail of the Smart Filter layer mask in the Layers palette, and you'll see the combination of filter effects only appear in the part of the image that falls inside of the white region of the layer mask. Only the portion of the image under the white part of the layer mask is now processed.

 

Smart Filters applied through a layer mask put the effects right where you want them. Here we masked and applied filters to a small area of the bee’s eye. The white dot in the black rectangle next to “Smart Filters,” above, indicates which part of the image has been modified.

 

Next: Filters with Brains (continued)

 

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Filters with Brains (continued)

 

Better blending. If you've ever used the blending modes for layers, you're familiar with the degree of creativity that's possible when you combine images using these modes to produce effects that could never be achieved with any number of layer masks or alpha channels. The Smart Filters feature implements a longtime “secret” trick known to savvy Photoshoppers: allowing blend modes to be used for filtering operations. In order to access this hidden capability, press the Control key while clicking a specific filter in the filter stack, and you can see what happens, for example, when Gaussian Blur is applied to a layer in Color Dodge mode, a striking effect.

 

Any of the blending modes can be applied to the currently active layer, and you'll find both stunning (and frightening) results, depending on the combinations.

Even though Smart Filters might seem like the bee's knees, there are some limitations that might annoy advanced users. Regardless of the number of filters applied to a single layer, only one layer mask can be applied to the filter stack, hampering the common practice of applying different amounts of filtering to multiple regions of an image. That's yet another item to add to our wish list for Photoshop CS4.

 

 

 

 

 

 

BONUS TIP: Smarter Smart Filters

If you've been frustrated by not being able use the Shadow/Highlight tool in a nondestructive Adjustment Layer, you'll be totally stoked to find that in CS3, it can be applied to a layer as a Smart Filter.

 

Next: It's All Black & White

 

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It's All Black & White

 

The fastest way to convert color images to black-and-white in Photoshop has long been a simple matter of choosing the Grayscale mode from the Image > Mode submenu and allowing Photoshop to blend most of the green components of the image with a healthy dollop of red and almost no blue. Of course, that rarely results in a rich-looking image. Power users have tried a variety of other methods, including selecting a single channel from the Channels palette before invoking the Grayscale conversion, which forces Photoshop to utilize just that channel in the conversion process. Other techniques call up the mystical Calculations dialog in order to mix custom ratios of the main color components. The Channel Mixer delivered an expanded set of options.

 

CS3 offers a new Black and White mode that streamlines the process without leaving you with a flat-looking black-and-white image and allows you to choose exact percentages of any and all of the primary color components. There’s even an integrated tinting command, which essentially provides the Colorize portion of the Hue/Saturation color controls, for creating tinted versions of your grayscale images.

 

Custom-mix any color component to create rich-looking black-and-white images.

 

Next: A Better Way to Be Selective

 

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A Better Way to Be Selective

 

Isolating portions of an image is key to a multitude of different editing operations, especially for creative projects and detailed photo retouching and compositing. The art of making good selections is often honed over many years, and it can sometimes seem overwhelming. Luckily for Photoshop users of all experience levels, CS3 brings some new mojo to the task. The Quick Selection tool delivers an entirely new way to make selections, by simply painting over the general area you want to isolate.

 

As you paint over the desired area, the selection builds itself automatically, and of course, you can save the selection to its own alpha channel for further refinement. While some might find the Quick Selection tool useful, there’s no way to adjust the sensitivity, something we got into the habit
of doing with the Magic Wand.

 

The Refine Selections dialog is an extremely welcome addition that significantly streamlines the process of choking (contracting) and spreading (expanding) the outer edges of a selection, and controls the softness of the edges of a mask, all in an interactive fashion that matches manual techniques.

 

There’s a lot of control to be explored in the Refine Selections dialog. The best way to understand the dynamics of it is to experiment with making a selection around something and opening the Refine Edges dialog, which features a contextual preview à la Quick Mask mode, showing the selected area against white, black, the actual background, or the mask channel displayed by itself. Refine Edges is our pick for the most useful new tool for compositing professionals

 

Refine Selections delivers seriously fine control for making precision masks.

 

BONUS TIP: Intolerent Tolerance

Changing the Magic Wand’s Tolerance setting has no effect on the Quick Selection tool. While it seems odd that we would try this, we did discover that this Tolerance setting does indeed control the sensitivity of the otherwise-unrelated Grow command (found in the Select menu).

 

Next: Camera Raw Talent

 

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Camera Raw Talent

 

The RAW format has become the standard for digital photographers who take their craft seriously, and Adobe has added some truly useful new tweaks to the Camera Raw screen. If you’ve ever had to adjust the overall exposure of an image to bring out dark shadow detail, you already know what happens to the light regions of the image—they tend to wash out, losing significant detail. The Fill Light slider does wonders in brightening up the overall picture, while Recovery restores the detail to the bright areas that lose their fine detailing when Fill Light is used a bit too eagerly. Vibrance does a lovely job of pumping up overall color values without pushing the image too much into clipsville, and is a good way to add life to a flat photograph.

 

An integrated red-eye removal tool and basic retouching brush have been added to the Camera Raw dialog, though it’s hard to justify not simply doing these tasks inside of Photoshop itself.

 

Recovery, Fill Light, and Vibrance work together to make our subject look, er, lovely.

 

Next: Bridge Over Troubled Water?

 

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Bridge Over Troubled Water?

 

Adobe’s Bridge application has become the launch pad for all media, and the update of Bridge, included with Photoshop CS3, includes some slick tricks. Anyone who’s been using the public beta of Adobe’s Lightroom program will immediately notice that Bridge now looks like a Lightroom Lite, with a dark visual motif that’s easy on the eyes. We love the fact that you can Command-click on multiple images and compare them side by side. And there’s even a handy new magnifying loupe that can be positioned anywhere in the main viewing panel.

 

Side-by-side comparisons and an integrated loupe tool improve Bridge’s usefulness.

 

The new "Stacks" metaphor is a helpful way to visually group related images together, to make the most efficient use of interface space—it’s also a feature that Apple Aperture users will be familiar with. The number in the upper-left corner of a stack indicates how many images are in it; clicking on the number displays the stack.

 

Stacks are a slick way to quickly organize related images.

 

Though it’s no Keynote, Bridge has a much-improved slideshow function, with a slew of transition effects, expanded timing options, and other little touches that make it quite nice for on-the-fly presentations of your Photoshop handiwork.

 

Next: Is It Worth the Upgrade?

 

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Is It Worth the Upgrade?

 

There are scads of additional features, changes, and additions that we simply don’t have room to cover here, including expanded video-output support to statistical analysis tools, auto alignment and blending of multiple layers, support for live 3D object layers, and more. Creatives who work with large images and need to share them with colleagues over the Web can export full-resolution images to CS3’s Zoomify format. The images load quickly in Adobe Flash Player, and recipients can zoom in on specific areas of an image by using the arrow keys, plus (+), and minus (-). Meanwhile, Device Central can help designers format images for display on mobile devices. We highlighted the updates that seem to have the widest application or that address frustrations we’ve long had with the app.

 

At press time, Photoshop CS3 was still in public beta, so it’s likely that Adobe will fix a host of bugs large and small for the shipping version due out this spring (look for our review in an upcoming issue of Mac|Life magazine and here on MacLife.com). What’s clear from the many hours we’ve spent with the beta version is that Photoshop CS3 packs significant improvements over CS2. If you have an Intel Mac, upgrading is a no-brainer. And if you never stepped up to CS2, you might as well skip ahead to CS3 - unless, of course, your hardware is too outdated to run Mac OS 10.4.8, which CS3 requires.