The digital age has had many advantages, not least of which is the increased communication made possible by e-mails and the Internet. However, one of the greatest strides has been making digital images an integral part of our lives.
The definitive program for editing these images is Photoshop. Although more simplified graphic software packages are now readily available — they are bundled with everything from digital cameras to scanners — Photoshop remains in a league of its own. It is the software of choice for the advertising and media industries, photographers, Web developers and graphic designers.
Although its name echoes its original primary purpose — editing photos — and still implies that Photoshop is just for photographs, it has evolved into more than that. It is now arguably the premiere image crea- tion tool.
Photoshop, in the words of one designer, is the ”de facto image manipulating and creating software”. She demonstrated how easy it was to create images, logos and manipulate them with the recently released version 7.0.
”They have managed to pack in even more this time,” she enthused, showing off tweaks and changes to already sophisticated manipulation tools.
Her response is pretty standard. Although cult followings are common for computer hardware such as Macs and Palms, I was amused to discover the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), which produces the Photoshop User magazine. It will also host a conference called PhotoshopWorld, in Tampa, Florida, this year.
A look at this site and several others shows the obsession involved. A quick search on www.google.com yielded ”about 3180000” results for Photoshop with many offering to teach you skills for the package, while others produced amusing examples of digital archaeology with websites trumpeting the ”new” version 3 and 4 of the software from 1997.
Such online resources demonstrate not only the software’s standing but the extent of the community that uses it.
Photoshop is the complete graphic art studio for your computer. With this program you can single- handedly create, edit and manipulate any image in ways that in the past were only possible with a whole studio of artists and craftsmen.
The manufacturer, Adobe, has consistently improved on the package. Although this release is not as much of a leap forward as previous versions, it is still top dog in the pack.
”Without a doubt, Photoshop remains the premier image- manipulation package in its class,” concluded technology website ZDnet.
Although some of its new features may go unused by most users, Photoshop has simplified itself sufficiently to the point where it can be used by a complete novice like myself. And while many other programs have caught up with some of its advances, Photoshop is still the original. The latest version puts it back in poll position for graphics packages.
I realised that digital plastic surgery is now truly in a league of its own when a photographer told me on a recent photo shoot: ”Don’t worry, we can Photoshop it afterwards.”
When your brand name becomes a verb, it means your product has truly arrived — a bit like ”Xerox” replacing ”photostat” and ”Jacuzzi” super- seding the ”hot tub”.
Indeed with Photoshop 7.0, this is more true than ever. Simply put, it is the ultimate in image editing.
Although ”warmer”, version 7’s look and feel is much the same but there are a few useful improvements. One of the most striking is the Healing Brush, a ”fountain of youth for photo- graphs of people” that allows you to seemingly magically smooth wrinkles and remove skin blemishes from pictures.
”Photoshop 7.0’s new Healing Brush may be the single coolest tool in Photoshop ever and when you use it, all you can do is shake your head and say, ‘How in the world does it do that?’ It’s that cool,” the NAPP gushed under the headline ”Photo, heal thyself”.
It continues with as much unbridled optimism: ”It recreates the skin texture in a way that’s absolutely amazing. To see it in action is nothing short of stunning and you can use it and its companion tool, the Patch, to do much more than just removing wrinkles. It mends backgrounds with scratches, removes dots, spots, and much more. This tool is nothing short of a retoucher’s dream, and if you retouch photos, this tool will pay for itself the first time you use it. Basically, when it comes to retouching photos in Photoshop, this tool changes everything.”
Previously editing such blemishes involved using the ”clone stamp” tool, with which you sampled sections of skin and ”cloned” them over the blemishes.
Its sexiest use is obviously for Web design. Most websites are first designed in Photoshop before being spliced up and turned into the code that allows you to view them in your browser. With Photoshop 7.0 it is even easier for designers to make Web page elements transparent by simply clicking on the colour they want to knock out. There are also the choices made possible by the ”new dithered transparency option” — which lets you make certain elements partially transparent so that Web graphics can blend into the background.
Another extremely useful feature gives you the ability to ”save for Web”. This uses another Adobe product called ImageReady — first packaged with Photoshop 6.0 — and prepares and optimises images for the Web. It allows you to save the image in the format and size best suited for viewing it on a computer screen. The Internet requires a resolution of only 72 dpi (dots per inch), while newspaper print requires 150 dpi and other publications such as magazines need 300 dpi. But the higher the resolution the larger the file, a problem when downloading websites. This facility allows you to save the image in the most commonly used formats — jpegs and gifs — and appropriate size.
Being able to choose the ”save for Web” option in Photoshop 6.0 was a massive step for me when I was a newbie Internet journalist a few years ago. Previously I had to fiddle with several settings to save Madam & Eve for posting on the Mail & Guardian’s website. This feature optimised the images with a few mouse clicks.
What Photoshop, like many other graphics packages, also allows you to do is create ”layers” in the images. These are the equivalent of ”tracks” in a music recording, that isolate, for example, the vocals, guitar and drums. This allows you to separate, say the background colour from the text, or individual items such as logos or pictures. With this ability you can edit and alter them to your heart’s content.
Photoshop has a series of templates and effects, so you can impose, say, camouflage on to an image, as a London-based textile designer proudly showed me. You can duplicate images and move them around, twist shapes and alter colours.
In short, you can do everything on screen that artists, illustrators and draftsmen used to do on a piece of paper. The difference is that all your work is digital. Another innovation in its key function of photo editing is the Auto Colour adjustment tool. This lets you remove unwanted tones from your photos, such as the green shade caused by fluorescent lights.
Apart from these innovations, the other tools in this latest release may not be as groundbreaking as those in previous versions but Photoshop is still the best there is.
”Every new version of Photoshop has delivered significant, noteworthy improvements,” ZDnet wrote in its review. ”Photoshop 4.0 unveiled Effects Layers and Actions; Photoshop 5.0 brought us the History Palette and Layer Styles; Photoshop 6.0 introduced Shapes. Hence, Photoshop 7.0’s perfunctory, should-have-been-there-earlier enhancements, such as the new file browser and updated paint engine, are a bit of a letdown. For the first time, we’re not convinced that every Photoshop devotee and graphics professional must upgrade.
”But, as far as graphics applications go, Photoshop is still the best, most sophisticated image-editing software available. If you don’t own an earlier version and want the best image editor on the market — or need it to run on [Mac] OS X — version 7.0 is the best of the bunch.”
This is certainly true of the Windows platform, where nothing compares. The latest Mac operating system, OSX, has the most sophisticated photo package I’ve come across, but still has nothing on Photoshop.
I was impressed with the nifty ”file browser” feature that enables you to view thumbnails of your graphic files, rename them in batches, rotate or edit them.
You can also save your custom palettes, the small on-screen boxes of tools, into the setting you want, as well as the Tools Preset option. The NAPP calls the latter a ”feature that in its own right is vying for the ‘gotta have it’ category. This is big, mondo crazy big, because not only can you set up your workspace to your own custom layout, now you can set up your tools to use the exact options you want.”
A drop-down menu also lets you select from the most common document sizes.
The Brushes palette includes a variety of shapes, including leaves and grass, as well as offering a wide array of presets that allow for massive variation in each brush-type.
Considering how much design work is done in Photoshop, the fact that a spell checker is included in the text editing tool is a great idea — especially as photographers are so partial to using nouns as verbs.