New Photoshop CS2
Web Design & Technology News, May 7, 2005

May 7, 2005

Whoever said "the camera never lies" was either a prankster, a simpleton or somebody who had never heard of Photoshop.
By David Pogue

Adobe Photoshop, of course, is the world's most popular photo-editing software (for Mac and Windows). Every time a magazine pastes a movie star's head onto a different body for its cover, you can bet Photoshop was involved. Such digital manipulation is so common that "Photoshop" has become a verb: "My ex-husband was on that trip, too, but I've Photoshopped him out of this shot."

But even when no movie stars are decapitated, Photoshop's magic is at work all around you. Photoshop color-corrects, brightens, darkens, crops, airbrushes imperfections from, or sharpens a huge percentage of the photographs you see every day, whether in ads, articles and movies or on CDs, Web sites or the covers of books.

No wonder, then, that when Adobe Systems releases a new version, as it did last week, photographers and designers sit up and take notice.

Still, Photoshop is now 15 years old, and Photoshop CS2, as it's called, is the 11th version. What features could possibly be added that would not make Photoshop even more vast and complex than it already is? (To give you some feeling of that vastness and complexity, there are at least 95 Photoshop how-to books, three Photoshop magazines and four annual Photoshop conferences. No wonder, because you don't get a printed manual with the software.)

Some of the additions in CS2 are administrative tools rather than creative ones. One, in particular, is aimed at alleviating the sense of despair you may feel on first encountering Photoshop's staggering array of 494 menu commands. It's the Edit Menus dialog box, where you can hide commands you never use and highlight (in color) commands you use most often. You can even switch among sets of edited menus on the fly.

Photoshop CS2 also comes with Bridge, an all-new graphics-browsing program that bears an uncanny resemblance to, say, iPhoto from Apple Computer. It looks like a slide sorter, displaying thumbnail versions of all the graphics files on your hard drive. You can rotate or crop them, give them star ratings or text labels, delete the duds, conduct slide shows and so on.

More important to professional photographers, Bridge also applies certain transformations to batches of photos all at once, without interrupting work in Photoshop: conversions from one file format to another, for example, or standard color adjustments. For those who process gigabytes of photo files a day (especially RAW files, the very big but extremely adjustable photo files preferred by advanced shooters), this background-processing feature can save a lot of time.

Bridge also connects directly to Adobe's online stock-photo service, which lets designers browse, buy and directly open professional, royalty-free photos from services such as Comstock and Getty Images. (Note to designers who do not work for global media conglomerates: don't get all excited. The photos cost $200 to $400 each.)

Most Photoshop fans will be grateful for the way the Font menu now depicts a sample of each typeface--and not so grateful for the Windows-style copy-protection system that Adobe has introduced in this version. On installation, your copy of Photoshop phones home over the Internet, to prevent you from installing it on more than two computers.

Of the artistic features, Adobe has doled out its goodies evenhandedly to its various constituencies. For everyday shutterbugs, a new tool quickly removes red-eye, the byproduct of flash photography that makes adorable children look like crimson-pupiled spawn of the Devil. The Spot Healing brush is another quicker fixer-upper; you can use it to delete an unwanted element of a photo--from a single freckle to a bystander's entire body--with just a few clicks. When this feature is on good behavior, Photoshop undetectably clones bits of the background to paint out the offending element. (Photoshop inherited the Spot Healing brush from its inexpensive sibling, Photoshop Elements.)

For more serious photographers, new special-effect filters can correct common kinds of lens distortion, such as barrel distortion and pincushioning, in which the photo seems swollen or puckered toward the center.

For graphic designers, Adobe comes bearing two gifts. One is a wild new Warp mode, which can distort a photo as if it were on a sheet of stretchy, curly latex. When you want to wrap a custom label around a soda can, or make a plasma TV ripple in the breeze like a flag, the Warp feature is just the ticket.

The new Smart Objects, unhelpfully named though they may be, are even more flexible. Ordinarily, anything you paint or paste into a Photoshop document becomes what is called a bitmap: a memorized array of colored dots, frozen until you paste or paint over them.

But once you designate an area of your artwork as a Smart Object, the rules change. You can shrink that scrap of image at will, without worrying that you won't be able to scale it back up if you change your mind. (By contrast, ordinary bitmaps--Dumb Objects?--lose so much resolution when re-enlarged that they look jagged and horrible.) If you duplicate a Smart Object, furthermore, the copies are all linked to the original. Change one fire hydrant's color, and you change them all.

Zeroing in on the Vanishing Point
By far the coolest new feature in Photoshop CS2, though, is called Vanishing Point. It's also the most difficult to describe; in the attempts you find on the Web, you can practically see the knuckle marks on the writers' foreheads. But here goes.

Suppose you're trying to edit a picture that includes flat surfaces in perspective: receding gymnasium floorboards, say, or city buildings, or a moving van photographed from the back left corner. In each case, trying to paste or paint something into the shot is fiendishly difficult, because you have to maintain the same V-shaped shrinking away to the vanishing point.

But if you click four corners with the Vanishing Point tool, Photoshop learns exactly how that surface recedes. Anything you paste or paint into that area shapes itself into perfect perspective. Copy a window from one side of the building, and Photoshop snaps it into the size and shape appropriate for the adjacent side. Suddenly it's easy to paint a new company logo onto that moving van or seamlessly repair a ripped-up section of those floorboards (by copying from an intact area).

This new feature has been accused of being demo-ware, suitable primarily for dazzling demonstrations at trade-show booths. But even if you need this tool only occasionally, when the day arrives, it can make almost impossible editing jobs practically effortless.

The price for all of this power, online, is $150 for an upgrade, or $550 for the full version. A spreadsheet's worth of other prices are available, depending on how many of the Adobe Creative Suite programs--Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, Acrobat, Photoshop--you already own, and how many you want to upgrade.

Now if you're not a hard-core pixel pusher, weigh Photoshop's magic carefully against its complexity. Remember that the somewhat simpler Photoshop Elements ($100) offers 80% of Photoshop's power for about one-sixth the price. In fact, if all you want to do is organize, share, search and sort your photos, easy-to-use programs such as Picasa 2 for Windows (free) and iPhoto 5 for Macintosh ($80 with four other programs in the iLife suite) make even more sense. These programs rotate, crop and color-correct your photos, though they stop short of Photoshop tricks such as removing a telephone pole sticking out of someone's head.

If you use Photoshop on the job, though, or if you use it more than a couple of times a week, get the upgrade. These bigger tweaks, along with a lot of smaller ones, make CS2 a worthy investment. Thanks to Dr. Adobe's careful nips and tucks, Photoshop CS2 stands ready to make the camera lie in all sorts of ingenious new ways.