Photoshop CS: It's a Big Deal Poweful New Features Aplenty Scott Koegler
Adobe's category-leading image editing application Photoshop is now in version "CS," which may as well stand for "Can't Stop." What's nice about this latest release is that many of the new features are as useful to the power user as they are to the graphics professional. The bottom line? If there was ever a time to shell out $600 for a graphics editor (or $200 if you're upgrading from an earlier version), this may be it.
Photographic Specialties
If you're not a graphic artist, your main source of images is likely to be your digital camera. Photoshop is a dream for handling all these images and making them look even better than they did through your camera lens. Unless you're very agile with the settings of your digicam, you probably don't change your white balance or set your cam up for different lighting conditions. And even with the scarily intuitive programming in high-end cameras, it's still possible to make bad images.
Photoshop has added two powerful features that help users recover those shots that could have been great if only they had had enough time (and knowledge) to initially tweak the necessary settings.
The new Shadow/Highlight Adjustment feature is nearly magical in its function. Simply select the menu option and a preview of the program's best-guess fix appears. In our testing, Photoshop's first guess was as good as we could make the exposure even after fiddling with the manual changes. It took our underexposed subject and overexposed background and brought the detail out in each, saving our otherwise obviously amateurish photos.
The other saving grace is a little more technical and requires the use of a relatively new digital camera that saves its images in the Camera RAW format. This format is pretty much exactly what it sounds like — the raw data collected from the image sensor before the camera has performed any kind of processing.
Of immediate interest to us are those shots we took indoors without a flash that almost always look way too orange. Using the RAW image data we were able to apply the indoor color balance setting that we forgot to set before taking the picture and make the shot look like it was taken with the proper color balance. And because the adjustments were made in the raw format, we didn't lose any detail in the image.
The Light Box
Photoshop CS's bag of goodies extends far beyond just tweaking you digital camera pictures to get the best natural look. The graphic app's enhanced image browser is a dream to use. It's an updated version of the visual browser that's now called the light box. You can view high quality thumbnails in pretty much whatever size you like, select the images you want to work on, and modify the document information that's carried within each file. This means you can add keywords, descriptions, and any other information you think might be helpful in finding or categorizing your images, and then searching or sorting your images based on that data.
