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My previous version of Photoshop is version 6, so I have some serious catching up to do! Although while using the trial version, I did discover some very nice things about it that are already useful in my regular activities, now that I have Web Premium. Below, I’ll discuss the features I like that I have used so far.

Updated Interface

I really like the new interface. You have the ability to easily collapse or expand any palettes you desire, with a single click. Check out the screen shots below. The first is the main palette dock, fully expanded. It takes just a click on the top bar to collapse the dock to just icons.

The second is with the dock collapsed, in icon view, so it takes up much less room, but the individual palettes are still easily accessible.

The final picture shows the collapsed dock, with the Color palette expanded. It remains open until you either click another palette, opening it instead, or click the arrow in the upper right corner of the Color palette to close it.

You can press the TAB key to hide all panels, palettes, and toolbars. This can be useful when you need to maximize your working space. The tool palette and dock can be shown by hovering the mouse over the left or right side of the Photoshop window, respectively. They disappear again when the mouse is moved off them for a short time.

You can also choose from a set of default workspaces, which arrange the dock and palettes in a particular way to be most useful when doing a particular task. There are several defaults workspaces, and you are able to create your own custom workspaces as well. This can be useful in reducing the amount of time spent showing/hiding and moving around the various palettes. The workspace can easily be changed via the Workspace menu in the main toolbar. The same list is also under Window->Workspace.

Cross-Application Integration

One certain benefit of Adobe purchasing Macromedia is that we can see better integration between the different applications. To move an image from Photoshop to Dreamweaver, one merely needs to copy the image in Photoshop and paste it in Dreamweaver. No more saving the file in Photoshop, then opening Dreamweaver and manually adding the image to a page. Also, there is better support for importing Photoshop files into Flash. I had tried it before with Photoshop 6 and Flash 5, ad it didn’t work so well then, but it is better now. This will make Flash movie development easier.

Photomerge

An interesting thing to do with digital photos is to take several at a time, side by side, collectively forming a panoramic image. There are various methods to combine these into a single wide image on the computer. Up until now, I have used a combination of free software packages to do the job - check out my panoramas gallery for some of the resulting pictures.

Photoshop CS3 has a new feature - Photomerge - that can simplify this work. It is found under File->Automate->Photomerge. It prompts you for a group of two or more photos, or a folder of them. There are manual options for positioning and alignment, but the quick way is to have Photoshop Auto Layout and Blend images together. Let it do its thing, and a while later - depending on the number of photos involved - a panorama is produced. The image below shows my first try with a series of 10 photos showing a 180-degree view of Victoria’s inner harbour.

Not bad. You can see where photos were automatically rotated, aligned, and transformed so things lined up nicely. This is a much quicker process than the one I was using before. Shown below is the final image, cropped, resized, and lightened. Now I’m thinking I need to go through my photo archives and see what else I have that I can throw at this feature!

Camera Raw

Camera Raw was originally a plug-in for an older version of Photoshop - 7 I think. It is at version 4, and is part of Photoshop CS3. Camera Raw is Adobe’s software that allows users to manipulate RAW images taken with a digital camera.

Using Camera Raw, you can load a RAW image file and manipulate various settings such as Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Brightness, Contrast, and several others (the ones mentioned are the ones I use the most). Not to mention the buttons just below the histogram at the top. You can adjust the values recorded in the file, if the image didn’t come out right right, by moving various sliders. A screenshot is shown below, and I’ll explain some more.

So the image didn’t come out well. It’s a bit dark in there. No problem with RAW images + Camera Raw! For a start, you can click on Auto for Camera Raw to take a “best guess” at the settings, and tweak from there. Notice that when the image is first loaded, the boxes on the right side are all zeroed out. They are adjusted when you manipulate the sliders or use the Auto button.

That’s an improvement. The brightness is a bit much though - the sky is somewhat washed out - so I’ll move the Brightness slider a little to the left.

That looks rather better than the original image.

The plus side of doing this is that it is non destructive, so it doesn’t permanently alter the data in the RAW file. So you can go back later and undo the initial changes, or make further changes. The changes are stored in a “sidecar” file, with the same name as the RAW file, but with the .XMP extension. This is a bit annoying as the sidecar file is a separate file, and must be in the same folder as the RAW file, else the changes made to the RAW image will not appear in Camera Raw.

Camera Raw supports quite a few digital cameras from different manufacturers, and adds support for more in every update. My camera, the Nikon D50, is of course supported, so Camera Raw knows what to do with various settings the D50 adds to the RAW files. If I get another digital camera in the future that supports RAW, chances are Camera Raw will support it as well.

That’s all I have figured out with Camera Raw so far, I have much more to learn! But I can already see that it will be so useful for making sure my photos wind up looking just right.

Photoshop vs Photoshop Extended

Another change from Adobe was to introduce a higher-level version of Photoshop, known as Photoshop Extended. It costs noticeably more, and includes additional tools for medical, scientific, and technical purposes. Maybe those tools could have been sold as plug ins, instead of fracturing Photoshop itself, like they already did with the CS3 suites!

I think the Photomerge feature, which I talked about in the previous section, is specific to Extended. I haven’t yet used any of the other Extended-specific features.

Extended is part of Web Premium and Design Premium, as well as the upcoming Master Edition. It can be bought as a standalone product, of course. There may be some people, with particular needs, who would like that, but that doesn’t include me. The only reason I have it is because it is part of Web Premium. The base (basic?) version of Photoshop is also available standalone, and is part of Design Standard.

Conclusion

There is so much more to Photoshop CS3 than I have covered here - that’s what I have to figure out first! There’s enough features here to keep me learning for a long time!

In my opinion, Photoshop CS3 is a great upgrade. It might not be as worthwhile for those using CS2, but since I was previously using Photoshop 6 (!), this version is a big step up for me.