Mac|Life photo-processing software RSS Feed

Pixelmator 1.1.4

David Biedny — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:12:42 -0500

Instant Filters: This Zoom effect takes time to render in Photoshop, but happens instantly in Pixelmator, thanks to Core Image.

Apple loads iPhoto ’08 as standard issue onto every Mac sold, and while the app makes sharing and organizing photos a super-cinch, iPhoto doesn’t offer much of the power of Apple’s real-time Core Image technology. So is there room for a Core Image–savvy contender in the sub-$100 category of image editors? Pixelmator seems to think so. The Pixelmator app offers a $59 alternative to Photoshop. While we love the real-time filter effects, there’s a quite a bit that does not thrill us with this initial offering.

Pixelmator’s clean, uncluttered interface looks like a tweaked version of Photoshop Elements, with the familiar tool palette on the left side and the layers palette on the right. Anyone who’s used basic image-editing software will feel at home within moments, and the level of integration with your existing images is notable: Pixelmator has an image browser that hooks directly into your iPhoto libraries, Pictures folder, or Photo Booth images, which is convenient. But we couldn’t select any other folder on our various drives, a frustrating limitation. On the other hand, Pixelmator can open just about every bitmap image format currently in use.

All the expected editing tools are here: clone brush, magic wand, paintbrushes, gradient tool, softening and sharpening tools, and more. They all work relatively well, but lack some of the control offered by comparable tools found in Elements. The overall layers implementation is decent, with the full array of Photoshop blending modes, but forget about Photoshop’s Layer Styles or nondestructive adjustment layers for color-correction work. This also means that you can’t apply a single color-correction pass to all the layers of a multilayered document—you’ll need to do each layer individually, which could mean serious work in a densely layered composition.

Filters are where Pixelmator shines, with comprehensive support for Core Image routines, delivering a cornucopia of visual effects that aren’t available in Photoshop, such as a hexagonal mosaic and an array of kaleidoscopic distortions. And many of these filters function in real time, something you’ll quickly learn to love.

Pixelmator has some noticeable problems, however, that make it tough to recommend as a primary image editor. It lacks grids and rulers, which makes precision a pipe dream. When you’re using a filter, and the filter dialog is open, you can’t zoom in and out of an image—you have to cancel out of the filter, zoom to the view you want, and then reinvoke the filter. In some ways, the app’s performance is quite good. Tweaking the controls of the Unsharp Mask filter, for example, resulted in instant onscreen image updates. But it completes other tasks at a glacial pace—in our testing, for example, applying a 40-pixel feather to a rectangular selection caused the beach ball to spin for almost 15 seconds, a digital eternity. And using the soften tool, often required us to hold down the mouse button for a few seconds to start blurring the image, even on our 2.16GHz MacBook Pro, which is just not acceptable.

The bottom line. Pixelmator is a decent first attempt at creating an affordable image editor, but Photoshop Elements 6 (4 out of 5 stars, Jun/08, p58) offers a more robust toolset and enhanced capabilities for only $30 more. If your budget is tight enough that $30 is a deal breaker, download Pixelmator’s 30-day trial version to see if the Core Image filters offer enough value to compel you to add it to your toolbox.

COMPANY: Pixelmator Team Ltd.

CONTACT: http://www.pixelmator.com/

PRICE: $59

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later

Briefly fun before it grows repetitive. Weapon and boat upgrades gives sense of progress. Certain ships and tiny character photos true to movies.

Even wind direction has little affect on unrealistic sailing. Boring pacing between waypoints. Easily sinkable enemies pose little threat.

Apple Aperture 2.1

Zack Stern — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:12:40 -0500

Adjustment settings can be saved and quickly applied to new photos.

We have thousands of digital photos, but still feel nostalgia for the days of leafing through prints crammed willy-nilly into dented shoeboxes. Wouldn’t it be nice to get your jumble of digital images out of their virtual shoeboxes? Blow up that favorite, or frame that one from last year’s family reunion and send it to your sister in St. Paul. Aperture 2 handles these tasks and more without the nagging clutter—or sneeze-inducing dust clouds—of those old shoeboxes. Meanwhile, it lets you nudge exposure levels and retouch problems. It essentially manages your photo library from import to export, keeping track of your changes and making the daunting task of cataloging hundreds or thousands of photos much easier than you ever thought it could be.

Aperture 2’s full-service workflow begins by importing images from a camera, flash card, or drive directory. It reads most image files, including a wide range of RAW formats. Our Canon 40D RAW files, for example, posed no problem. In our testing, the import process flowed smoothly, even in the background—though expect the app to tax your Mac’s performance if it’s an older, slower model.

Once your photos are imported, Aperture 2 helps you organize them all. We added tags and moved photos between different projects and albums. We even grouped photos of the same subject from the same angle, allowing quick comparison of different poses in the Viewer window. Our favorite organizational tool is Smart Albums. After assigning ratings and otherwise classifying individual photos, Smart Albums automatically creates groups. You could create an album of images that share a date range, come from a certain camera, and share a tag, for example. And any new images that fit those criteria will automatically be added to that album.

Updated in this version, photo-retouching tools expertly balance speed and simplicity. Hold the Command key with certain exposure adjustments, and an overlay clearly shows how your edits affect bright spots. New Retouch and Clone tools instantly fix skin blemishes and can erase sensor dust from the background. We were impressed with how easy those tools were to use and were thrilled by the instant results we achieved erasing dust from a solid background. With these powerful features at hand, most photographers can skip a standalone editor such as Photoshop.

After your albums are organized and edited, Aperture 2 exports the images. You can lay them out in a book or other mosaic, printing it at home or sending it to Apple, just as you can in iPhoto. Aperture 2’s exporting options allow you to process multiple photos, even working on them in the background while you make adjustments to other images. We especially like the feature-rich online galleries. Aperture creates simple HTML pages that you can host, while .Mac-only galleries support slide shows and stay synced to changes in your album.

The bottom line. Disorganized photographers will appreciate how Aperture expertly handles cataloging, basic edits, and exporting. This single tool might be the only photo software you need.

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.apple.com

PRICE: $200 ($100 upgrade from Aperture 1.0)

REQUIREMENTS: 2GHz or faster Intel Core Duo or dual G5 processors, Mac OS 10.4.1 or later, 1GB RAM

Manages total photo workflow. Smart albums and other tools assist organization. Exposure and retouching tools effectively rescue questionable shots. Wide image format support. Clean, HTML web galleries can run on any site. Universal binary.

Terrific Flash web galleries can only be exported to a .Mac site.

HDRSoft Photomatic Pro 3.0

Stuart Gripman — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:10:39 -0500

HDR and tone mapping bring out all the detail in this shot of Venice’s Grand Canal.

High dynamic range (HDR) photography is a technique designed to capture much more detail in color and contrast than traditional photography can. When taking a photograph, a camera can only capture a single exposure. A shaded subject with a bright sky behind it presents a classic conundrum. Capturing the details of the shaded subject requires an exposure that will wash out the sky. Yet an exposure optimized for the sky will underexpose the shaded area, swamping its details in inky darkness. HDR photography captures all those details by snapping three or more images at differing exposures and blending them together.

Photomatix Pro is software that blends the exposures for you. The application works by combining multiple source images into an HDR image, then bringing out the details through a process called tone mapping. The Workflow Shortcuts palette, new to version 3, simplifies the process. Simply click Generate HDR Image and select the source photos. The program supports JPEG, TIFF, and RAW files from most major camera manufacturers, and a smattering of less-common formats. We had no problem using RAW files from our Canon Digital Rebel XT. While we appreciate the simplicity of creating HDR files, the omission of a Save step is suspicious. To create multiple tone maps from one HDR photo, you must remember to save the HDR photo immediately after it’s created. Forget to save before tone mapping, and you’ll have to load your source images over again if you want to get back to the unprocessed HDR.

Tone mapping is where the drama emerges. Photomatix offers two methods to really make an HDR image bloom. The default method, called Details Enhancer, offers a wide array of options for varying contrast, light smoothing, saturation, white and black points, and so on. But this creative freedom is a mixed blessing—we regularly found it difficult to keep our picture looking very realistic using the Details Enhancer. Tone Compressor mode streamlines things by taking away some of the Details Enhancer’s tools. While its options are greatly reduced, the images we created with the Tone Compressor were dramatic without straining credibility.

Photomatix has a few other riffs on the HDR theme. The Exposure Blending tool creates an HDR-like image, although it doesn’t offer tone mapping. Batch Processing in Photomatix is appropriately robust and refreshingly simple. Building an intuitive user interface for batch processing is challenging, and we found HDRSoft’s approach to be a very good compromise of usability and features.

The bottom line. Photomatix Pro 3.0 is an excellent tool for creating high dynamic range photographs. It’s a shame the $100 tag prices out dabblers, but professionals and enthusiasts will find it a good value. A Tone Mapping Plug-In ($69) is also available for Photoshop CS2 or CS3. For a detailed walk-through of Photomatix Pro, see p85.

COMPANY: HDRSoft

CONTACT: www.hdrsoft.com

PRICE: $99

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later

Easy to create striking HDR images. Well-executed batch processing. Universal binary.

Unprocessed HDR photos aren’t automatically saved.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6

David Biedny — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:09:52 -0500

The Guided Edit mode gives you a column of options for easy editing.

Photoshop Elements has long played the role of little brother, with a streamlined interface and toolset designed for amateur photographers, hobbyists, and anyone who doesn’t need all of Photoshop’s advanced functionality—or $649 price tag. At $90, Elements 6 is a tremendous bargain, and head and shoulders above previous versions.

This is the first Universal binary version of Elements, and the performance boost on Intel Macs closely mirrors that of Photoshop CS3—it boots quickly and generally feels smooth and responsive. We also ran it on a G4 Titanium PowerBook and a Dual Power Mac G5 with respectable speeds. While Adobe claims that Elements can run with 512MB of RAM (1GB is recommended), we found that the program sometimes crashed on our PowerBook, which has 1GB of RAM, but never on our MacBook Pro or Power Mac G5, with 3GB and 2GB of RAM, respectively. We suggest downloading the trial version to see how it performs on your machine.

Elements’ three primary modes—Edit, Create, and Share—are designated by tabs in the upper-right. Edit is the main event, with redesigned icons in the main tool palette and a contextual Options bar at the top of the screen. The excellent Guided Edit mode offers up a single screen of editing options to make things even easier.

Much of what you would ever want in Photoshop is here, from the Healing and Spot Healing brushes to the Rubber Stamp and Cloning tools, with only a few compromises for the most serious image-editing tasks. Elements even has some fun features not found in Photoshop, such as the Cookie Cutter tool, which uses a library of shapes to create pseudo-layer masking effects, such as a cropping a picture of your sweetheart inside of a heart or a star. The Red Eye Removal tool automatically found the red eyes of the baby in our test image, without us having to make a selection, and amazingly, did a far better job than the red-eye tool in Photoshop CS3.

The Layers palette in Elements 6 delivers most of the same functionality as in Photoshop CS3, including all of the blending modes, layer style effects, and gradient and tinting layers. The big omission is true layer masking for more challenging compositing tasks. The Quick Selection tool is here, but Elements lacks even a single alpha channel or QuickMask slot.

The new Color Curves control is like a light version of Curves (Photoshop’s single most useful color correction tool)—it’s useful, but not implemented as a nondestructive adjustment layer, like Levels. Elements also packs enhancement tools for automatically addressing color cast and skin tone corrections, and handy new black-and-white conversion tools. Image sharpening is much improved with the new Unsharp Mask tool and a scaled-down version of Photoshop’s Smart Sharpen filter. RAW files are properly handled through a scaled-down version of Adobe Camera Raw, and they come in with either 8 or 16 bits of color depth, with many of Elements’ tools now working in 16-bit color mode.

Photomerge Faces and Group Shot let you create composite images from multiple source photos, mixing up facial features and the best takes of your group’s heads, respectively. You’ll want to put a little forethought into getting the most from these additions, but they’re fun to experiment with, and they produce fantastic results. All of Photoshop’s filters are here (including Liquefy), but we’d love to see a plug-in for tapping into Mac OS X’s Core Image effects.

The Create panel has tools for creating photo books, image collages, Web galleries, and PDF slideshows—all are very easy to use and yield attractive results. There’s also a nice selection of prefab frames, backgrounds, and text effects for whipping up instant cards, DVD cases, and other useful layouts. Share mode lets you email photos, burn CDs or DVDs, and directly order prints of your images.

The bottom line. Photoshop Elements 6 is an amazing value—it’s pretty much everything that a point-and-shoot photographer would want in an image editor, and possibly more than they’ll ever need.

COMPANY: Adobe

CONTACT: www.adobe.com

PRICE: $89.99, $69.99 upgrade

REQUIREMENTS: G4 or faster or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.4.8 or later, 512MB RAM, 1GB free disk space

Extensive toolset. Easy guided-editing mode. Photomerge Faces and Group Shot are cool. Low price. Universal binary.

A little flaky in low-RAM situations. No layer masks. Where are Core Image effects?

Season's Greetings, Gettings & Givings

The Mac|Life Staff — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:20:40 -0600

No more frosted faces or smiles stuck on “how nice.” No more regifting, exchanging, or Goodwill-ing stuff that missed the mark. This holiday season, all that you want will soon be here: the gewgaws, the tchotchkes, the doodads, and the thing-a-ma-bobs. The bags, the boomboxes, camcorders, and flaming logs. The mice, the cans, and the bling. Oh, you know - just about everything. Forthwith: Mac|Life’s greatest guide for gifts. Ever.

Want to take this gift guide with you to the store? Print it out with this handy PDF or upload it on to your iPod or iPhone with the files contained within this essential ZIP archive.

To: Mom, Dad or Aunt Edna

Your relatives want to make fun scrapbooks, online photo albums, and family videos to share with everyone in their worlds. Here’s some good stuff to keep those creative juices flowing.

Belkin Washable Mouse ($29.99) - Your sister will thank you again when she can quickly wash your 2-year-old nephew’s germs off the family’s shared mouse.

Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition ($99.99 to $149.99) - Every video, photo, and music enthusiast needs the gift of hard-drive storage, and 80GB to 160GB should do the trick.

Targus Soundup ($39.99) - Stick this sound-enhancer between Dad’s earphones and his iPod to stop his infernal complaining about his digital copy of Quadrophenia sounding too cold and sterile.

Pure Digital Flip Video Ultra Camcorder ($149.99 and $179.99) - Make this slim device the first present opened during the holidays so it can capture all of your other perfect gift picks. It records 640-by-480-pixel resolution video, ready for the Web or iMovie.

Software Mackiev The Print Shop For Mac 2 ($69.95 and $89.95) - Mom loves to send out that end-of-year family newsletter, and now she can fancy it up with this fun-to-use, jack-of-all-trades software.

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To: The Workaholic

It’s not just a 9-to-5 job, it’s a way of life. Set up your traveling worker bee with a useful gift, not a gimmicky toy.

Logitech VX Nano Cordless Laser Mouse for Notebooks ($69.99) - Five programmable buttons, a teeny-tiny USB receiver, and laser technology for precise mousing. ’Nuff said. Your laptop-using giftee will never go back to the Apple trackpad.

DLO iBoom Travel ($89.99) - The iBoom lets your traveling businessperson awaken to his or her own tunes, not a jarring wakeup call or that blaring hotel clock radio.

Rain Design mStand Laptop Stand ($49.90) - Watching your hard worker hunch over her Mac notebook makes your back hurt. The aluminum mStand puts her laptop at a more ergonomically friendly height and keeps the workspace clutter-free.

Griffin Technology PowerJolt Car Charger ($19.99) - Plug this puppy into your recipient’s car power socket, and that iPod or iPhone will stay tireless, not tired.

Bose QuietComfort Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones ($299) - Designed to cut out that mind-numbing airplane noise, these around-the-ear headphones will also provide sweet solace in a bustling office. (Get the QuietComfort 3, $349, if your recipient prefers on-the-ear ’phones.)

Want to take this gift guide with you to the store? Print it out with this handy PDF or upload it on to your iPod or iPhone with the files contained within this essential ZIP archive.

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To: Creative Types

The key to getting a good gift for the artist on your shopping list: Appeal to his love of aesthetics and sense of design, and you can’t go wrong.

KB Covers Keyboard Covers ($24.95 to $39.95) - These keyboard covers have the keyboard shortcuts for your giftee’s favorite apps—Photoshop and Final Cut, for example - right on the keys.

Digital Spectrum MV-1040 Plus Digital Frame ($229.99) - Help your photo lover take frames to a new level. With this 10.4-inch (measured diagonally) digital frame’s slideshow mode, you can display a series of images from a memory card, as well as play a soundtrack through the built-in speakers.

Pantone Huey ($89) - Every creative needs their display’s and printer’s colors to look the same for accurate prints. The Pantone Huey is a great bargain for accomplishing those color goals, and it even adjusts the display depending on the light in the room.

Logitech Nulooq Navigator ($79.99) - Put the controls for Photoshop (and other programs) at your artist’s fingertips, literally. This nifty navigation wheel is faster than using keyboard shortcuts or pointing-and-clicking.

Wacom Bamboo Fun Graphics Tablet ($99 and $199) - Enable budding digital artists by replacing their mouse with this pen and tablet input device - it’ll be much easier to retouch photos, draw, and paint. Comes in two big sizes.

Want to take this gift guide with you to the store? Print it out with this handy PDF or upload it on to your iPod or iPhone with the files contained within this essential ZIP archive.

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To: The Student

Learning? Ha! Students use tech gear for creating, having fun, and communicating. But really, isn’t that part of learning?

Scott Evest Ultimate Hoodie Microfleece ($69.99) - The hoodie is a staple of the college wardrobe, and this hoodie is made for the gadget-minded with all the pockets and loops a kid could want.

Apple iTunes Gift Card ($15 to 50) - There isn’t an iTunes Gift Card big enough to get all the songs your student wants, but it does send an important message: Don’t steal music (and avoid being a target of the recording-industry authorities).

Boston Innovative iMEP MP-702-388 ($299.99) - A cramped dorm room is the ideal place for the iMep, with its 7-inch LCD, a built-in TV tuner, radio, DVD player, and most importantly, a dock for an iPod.

Isis Memory Foam Laptop Sleeve ($22 to $24) - A student’s laptop is bound to take a beating, but a sleeve will absorb some of the shock. For 13.3-inch MacBooks and the 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pros. Design shown: the Nouveau.

Samson Zoom H2 Handy Recorder ($199) - This portable audio device will record class lectures, podcasts, or a dorm-room jam session and copy the audio to a Mac with no sweat.

Want to take this gift guide with you to the store? Print it out with this handy PDF or upload it on to your iPod or iPhone with the files contained within this essential ZIP archive.

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To: The Geek

If you decide to get your geek a tech gift, you can’t just go with any ol’ gadget. Instead, pick one of our suggestions, and your geek will be in high-tech heaven. Trust us.

Olinari Sterling Silver Dog Tag ($349 and up) - If he’s going to carry around a USB flash drive, you might as well get him one he can wear. This fashionable dog tag actually houses a 2GB USB drive.

Corsair Flash Padlock ($29.99 and $39.99) - Some data is just too important to lose. The Flash Padlock requires a personal identification number to access its contents.

Insanely Great Tees ($17) - The geek’s badge of honor (and identity) is the T-shirt, and these Mac-centric shirts are the bomb. Designs shown: Pixel Tools and (what else?) The Bomb.

Oregon Scientific ATC2K Waterproof Action Cam ($169.99) - Attach it to a helmet, a bike, or any other moving object to catch some extreme-sports video at 640-by-480-pixel resolution (recorded movies are in AVI format).

Want to take this gift guide with you to the store? Print it out with this handy PDF or upload it on to your iPod or iPhone with the files contained within this essential ZIP archive.

Happy hunting!

Exposure

Roman Loyola — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 18:45:32 -0500

Exposure's ingenious Preview Split lets you preview an effect on half of your image.

While photographers enjoy the wonders of digital technology, it's hard to leave the film camera behind completely. That's because different film stocks have unique, artistic effects on photographs that can't be replicated easily on a digital photo. But with Exposure, you can finally put that film camera to rest. Exposure is a set of Photoshop filters that can simulate different film stocks. It's a lot easier to use on your Mac than developing the actual film stock in a darkroom, but more importantly, Exposure creates authentic-looking results that'll satisfy many die-hard film photogs.

Exposure has 17 black-and-white film stock simulations, including Fuji Neopan, Ilford Delta, Kodak T-MAX, and Kodak TRI-X. Exposure also has 19 color stock simulations, including Agfa RSX II, Fuji Velvia, Kodak Ektachrome, and more. On top of all that, Exposure includes dozen and dozens of additional effects, such as daguerreotype, sepia tone, old film, applying grain, and more. But wait, there's more - you can adjust each effect using a full set of tools within Exposure, including saturation, curve controls, sharpening, grain intensity, and more.

Exposure is accessed within Photoshop via the Filters menu. Previews on a 3MB color photo took about 4 seconds to appear on our Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 with 4GB of RAM. Speaking of the preview, we love how Exposure lets you split the image in half, where the original is maintained in one half while the effect is applied in the other. Our only nitpick: You have to leave the Exposure interface if you want to switch back and forth between the color and black-and-white effects.

The bottom line. Exposure is a virtual treasure trove of photo effects. Digital photographers yearning for the look and feel of photo stock will love it.

COMPANY: Alien Skin
CONTACT: www.alienskin.com
PRICE: $199
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, 256MB RAM, Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 or later or Adobe Photoshop CS or later, Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004 or later
Easy to use. Lots of simulated looks to choose from. Universal binary.
Have to leave Exposure to switch between color and black-and-white effects.

Geophoto 1.1

Zack Stern — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:00:17 -0500

Simple controls rotate the world and zoom in, but not much closer than county level.

After the vacation of your life, all you have are your photos. With Geophoto, you can give your photos context by tagging them with global coordinates. The software displays a globe with photo thumbnails that are assigned to specific locations, and it's fun to spin and stop the globe and click to look at pictures...for a little while. However, Geophoto needs deeper integration with iPhoto to become a truly useful photo tool.

Geophoto works as a companion to (but independently of) iPhoto, Aperture, Flickr, and other photo-cataloging tools. Geophoto can import iPhoto albums, photocasts, and images directly from the Finder. You can pin photos to the globe, either with the search tool or by dropping them on the globe. We had difficulty locating a few of our favorite lesser-known landmarks and cities, but Geophoto recognized nearly all of our searches.

Once images are geotagged, users drag the globe to move and use a scroll-wheel to zoom in. This works well, and the map is somewhat detailed, although it goes nowhere near city-level. As a minor consolation, Geophoto can show a small Google Maps box that corresponds with the mouse position. However, we'd rather see street-level satellite images than a map, and this keyhole is nearly useless because photos are still pinned to the regular globe behind this street-level box.

Even if you don't geotag your own images, Geophoto can be useful for browsing other people's pictures. Its support for Flickr lets it pull in already geotagged shots and add them to your globe. Our favorite trick is to Control-click a blank part of the world and automatically import Flickr photos from that area. This level of Flickr support gives Geophoto more depth, but the app doesn't tie in tightly enough with any other tools. For example, users can import individual iPhoto albums but can't browse or import the full library. After locating a picture in Geophoto, why isn't it possible to jump back to it in iPhoto? Geophoto can update iPhoto pictures with geotags, but it only updates the JPEGs, not the original RAW files. And problems reach beyond iPhoto: Flickr users can't browse their own libraries, and can only add feeds based on search terms or member names.

The bottom line. Geophoto is a fun diversion, but it needs better integration with photo-management programs to reach its full potential.

COMPANY: Ovolab
CONTACT: www.ovolab.com
PRICE: $19.95
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later, 64MB VRAM, Internet connection recommended
Fun diversion to browse strangers' mages. Visual way to skim personal photos. Universal binary.
Needs more features to better tie it to photo-management apps. Street-level details à la Google Maps not supported. More toy than tool.

Adobe Photoshop CS3

David Biedny — Fri, 25 May 2007 17:47:26 -0500

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.

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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.