Once again, Adobe has hit the ball out of the park with another version of Photoshop (PS). No,wait…two versions: PS CS3 Standard and Photoshop Extended! In this review, let’s take a look at the new features common to both versions, and a word or two on the differences.
PS Standard is ideally meant for professional or amateur photographers, graphic designers and web designers. Standard still has all the features you know and love, plus more.
PS Extended is meant for professionals who are interested in film, video, motion graphics, 3D, industrial graphics, biomedical imaging and/or architectural graphics. Extended enables you to incorporate 3D content into your 2D composites. It enables you to interact with 3D models by supporting the following formats: 3DS, OBJ, U3D, KMZ, and COLLADA.
Panels – PS now sports new panels, which replace the previous palettes. This is new to PS. You can dock the panels together. Panels can be dragged between docks and can be minimized to icons on the screen. This enables you to conserve space in your work area. Cool shortcuts enable you to show/hide the panels with a keystroke.
Vanishing Point Enhancement – Vanishing Point now enables you to create multiple planes in your images. This increases the look for perspectives. The great thing about this enhancement is that you can create and connect the planes at any angle. If you are creating any type of mock packaging, this feature is great!
Selection Tool Improvements – We all know that making accurate selections can be the biggest pain! However, the folks at Adobe know this too. They’ve decided to ease our frustrations by improving the selection tools to enable us to make selections more easily and accurately. The new Quick Selection tool lets you paint a selection on your image, and then use the Refine Edge tool to smooth away any edges. To round it out, the Clone Source palette let’s you create and recall five different cloning source points. It comes with an optional overlay which enables you to setup your cursor before you clone. As a person that does photo restoration, I have to say I really like the Selection Tool enhancements. I do a lot of selecting and cloning. These features really help!
Black/White Conversion – It seems like a simple idea to convert a color image to black and white. In previous versions of PS, you may have not been able to get it exactly right. Now, PS CS3 enables you to change the tints and tonal values with a new tool. It has built-in black and white presets, and even a simulated infrared preset. Built-in presets are great though, if you’re like me, you want to create your own presets. You can create these custom presets and save them for later use.
Compositing – For those of you who enjoy creating composites (like me), PS CS3 enables you to more easily align the images with the Auto-align Layers command. This new feature automatically examines the layers, decides how to move, rotate or warp them, and then places them together perfectly. Another challenge when creating composites, is to blend the colors and shading together so they look like one image. PS CS3 has got you covered there with the Auto-blend Layers command. This feature blends the layers for you automatically. You can go back and edit them more, if you like.
Curves Dialog Box Enhancements – Those of us that use this tool, know it is a must when color correcting (as is the Levels dialog box). We know that it has needed enhancing for some time. Rejoice! The Curves dialog box now comes with some new image tonality features. Now, you can make black and white point adjusts. You can shadow or highlight clipping as well. The Curves dialog box also has several new presets to assist you in your color-correction efforts. Yea!
Non-Destructive Editing – A standard process when using PS has been to open your image and immediately copy the layer to avoid doing any destructive editing. Now, you can avoid this extra step by using the Convert for Smart Filters command. CS PS2 introduced us to Smart Objects, now CS3 takes it a step further. Using this feature, you can edit and alter your images without losing the original pixel data. However, a warning here is to ALWAYS backup your files. The filters are smarter, but we have to be smart as well.
Increased Performance for Mac Users – If you have one of the new Intel-based Macs, you will want to upgrade to PS CS3. This new version included specific performance enhancements for the Mac compared to CS PS2.
Camera RAW Enhancements – A cool thing about this enhanced feature is that it not only opens the RAW files (as it did in PS2), it now is able to open JPEG and TIFFs. This is great for the amateur photographer, because many of the lower priced point-and-shoot digital cameras only output in JPEG format. Additional enhancements to the Camera RAW are that it now includes many of the standard PS features: healing, cloning and monochrome conversion. I’m not sure why Adobe decided to include these additional features within Camera RAW itself. You can easily open the files in the main PS window and use these tools. Maybe it is to save a step? Either way, I’m glad they are there.
Finally, let’s round out the review by mentioning the differences between Standard and
Extended:
Feature Standard Extended 3D visualization and texture editing No Yes Motion graphics and video layers No Yes Movie Paint No Yes Measurement and data No Yes DICOM support No Yes MATLAB support No Yes
These new features listed above provide support for 3D and the other needs of the film, video,
web, manufacturing, medical, architectural, and scientific users. I did not review PS CS3
Extended for this review. Therefore, for more information on the specific PS CS3 Extended
features, please visit Adobe’s website at http://www.adobe.com .
Reviewed By: Loren Elks
Publisher:
Adobe
OS:
Windows XP