Adobe Photoshop CS3's Smart Filters let you use any of the app's many filter effects without actually changing the pixels permanently.

 

Adobe Photoshop has always been a big, complex playground of image-editing and -processing prowess, and Photoshop CS3 introduces some truly excellent new tools and tweaks. Anyone serious about image editing will want CS3. It gets our stamp of approval without hesitation.

 

If you're using an Intel Mac, the performance benefits of a fully native Photoshop are undeniable. You might not see a quantum leap in performance when you're doing hands-on work with one of the tools, but most functions move between 20 to 50 percent faster in CS3. Your own mileage may vary - for example, the Radial Blur filter (one of the slowest filters in Photoshop) was two times faster in CS3 running on a 15-inch 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro than it was in CS2 running on a Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5. Resizing a large image can be three to four times faster, a rather significant speed bump. All in all, Intel Mac owners will be very happy with the boost, and if you're still working on a G4 or G5 Mac, CS3 feels just about as snappy as CS2.

 

Filters have always been a major boon to creative work, and Photoshop CS3 finally delivers Smart Filters, nondestructive filters that allow much more freedom when you're trying different filter recipes. You can drag applied filters to different positions in the filter stack, resulting in completely different visual looks. Be aware, though, that performance can get sluggish when you're working with large images sporting lots of layers and stacked filters. We also discovered some limitations. For example, some filters, such as Lighting Effects and everything under the Artistic category, don't work as Smart Filters when an image is in CMYK mode, and you'll need to check with the publisher of your favorite third-party filters to see if they'll play well under Smart Filters.

 

Color-correction and color-enhancement tools take a significant step forward with the reworked Curves control, perhaps the single most crucial color-correction tool in Photoshop. Histograms are now overlaid in the main editing area of the Curves dialog, giving you a better idea of the brightness values of the pixels located in an image (or active selection) and reducing your need to use the Levels control. If you know about using the Option key in conjunction with the shadow and highlight sliders in Levels, you'll be thrilled to see those familiar sliders right there in Curves. Pressing the Option key while moving these sliders interactively shows you a thresholded version of the shadow and highlight regions in the main image window. And did we mention that Curves now has presets? Our only real complaint with the new Curves controls is that the histogram does not update itself to reflect tonal corrections while you're editing. You have to apply the changes and then go look at the Histogram panel.

 

The Auto-Alignment and Auto-Blending features will absolutely thrill photographers who create panoramic composites out of lots of individual photos. These tools do a wonderful job of finding overlapping areas of contiguous images and then blending them together with soft masks in a way that requires minimal editing afterward. Serious retouchers will adore the new Clone Sources palette, which provides options for automatically scaling and rotating cloned pixels, as well as an overlay mode that lets you see the clone source overlaid on the painting area as you work. Some artists will love this, although others may find it intrusive.

 

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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.