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Photoshop 7.0, Adobe's latest version of its popular photo-editing application, features a few fine new tools to speed up routine tasks like portrait retouching and photo cataloging, but when it's released in April, its biggest draw will be that it runs, finally, on Mac OS X.
Many Macintosh users have said that they're putting off switching to Apple's next-generation operating system, which was released last year, until Adobe releases Photoshop for the platform.
Well, that anticipated release is nigh: Reps for Adobe toured the tech press last week to prove that the new Photoshop is ready for release on both Windows and Mac machines -- but they gave no more precise date for release than "April."
Kevin Connor, Adobe's digital imaging chief, came toting a Mac Powerbook G4 running Mac OS X to show that indeed the application will run in a "native" OS X setting -- which means that it's been optimized for the new platform, making full use of OS X's Aqua interface.
But Connor noted that the application will run on other operating systems as well: Older versions of the Mac operating systems and all flavors of Windows will all offer a nearly identical Photoshop 7.0 experience.
Several new features appear in Photoshop 7.0, but after watching Connor's demo and playing around with the beta version, it's clear that many of the additions, while they may be cool, are relatively minor tweaks. Photo finishers will find a few new editing tools, a redesigned palette of brushes, a new "painting engine" and a "file browser" that makes managing large groups of pictures simpler than previous versions of the software.
But for many Photoshop users, especially those not on a Mac OS X, this release doesn't seem to be a must-have.
The Healing Brush is by far the most interesting addition to Photoshop 7.0. The brush works very much like the application's clone stamp tool, a feature that Photoshoppers, who do a lot of retouching, rely on.
The Healing Brush, too, is used for retouching. But instead of merely cloning, say, a patch of skin from one part of a digitized face to another, the healing brush adjusts the cloned patch to match the colors of its destination.
It does this automatically and, in most instances, rather well. Retouching most photos -- especially those of faces --becomes a two-minute snap.
Photoshop 7.0's other great feature is an expanded "file browser." The file browser first made its appearance in Photoshop Elements, Adobe's consumer version of Photoshop -- but the browser made handling a collection of photos so easy, Connor said, that the company decided to put it in the pro version.
The browser is a multipane window that displays thumbnails of all the pictures in a specific folder, provides detailed information about each picture, and allows a user to quickly make small changes to each picture file. Especially useful is the "batch rename" feature, which changes the meaningless file names that digital cameras assign to photos to recognizable English words.
Connor said that many of the new features in Photoshop should simplify working with images from digital cameras. Photoshop has, of course, a large following among multimedia professionals, but more than half of the software's users are not professionals. Since the use of consumer digital cameras has skyrocketed in recent years, Adobe decided to put more emphasis on the "digital camera experience" offered by Photoshop, Connor explained.
Adobe has also redesigned Photoshop's painting features, focusing most of its efforts on the system's "brush palette." Now, users can customize brushes in Photoshop in the minutest of ways, tweaking a brush's "shape, tilt, spacing, scatter, jitter, diameter, texture, shading and other attributes," according to the Photoshop Reviewer's Guide. (Lest you get confused in this thicket of options, the software features a nifty "stroke preview" to show what a brushstroke looks like before you try it out.)
The best part, Connor said, is that Photoshop users can save and trade the brush settings. "I think this will become as hot as Actions are now," he said, referring to the vibrant online exchange of Photoshop's customizable sequences.
A few other small features in the new version that users have anticipated involve ImageReady, Photoshop's companion for Web output. It has some new color features, such as enhanced compression of JPEG images and an easier way to make "rollover graphics," which do annoying things when you roll your mouse over them.
And, lastly, one new thing seems like it should have been there all along, but is only making its debut now: a spell-checker.
