A photographer’s take on Adobe Photoshop CS3
As digital photography evolves, the trend in digital editing has been towards providing the photographer with a workflow: selecting and transferring images from a camera or card reader, sorting and organizing them, then editing them for various outputs including prints and posting on the web. While Adobe Photoshop has been the industry's premier graphics editor for years, it has lagged behind other products such as Aperture and Lightroom in providing the photographer a complete workflow and ease-of-use features specifically focused on photography rather than graphic arts.
Consequently, each successive release of Photoshop has seen Adobe add additional or improved features related specifically to digital photography. Photoshop CS3 offers a strong list of new and improved features designed to help professional and advanced amateur photographers develop a workflow and take image preparation to its maximum potential. There are two versions of Photoshop CS3: Standard CS3 and CS3 Extended. Photoshop CS3, which is the focus of this review, is the basic upgrade from CS2. CS3 Extended includes advanced features for those working with videos and 3D applications. Those features will not be discussed here.
For Mac users, Photoshop CS3 now runs Intel-native code, allowing Intel-based Macs to run the program faster and more stably than CS2. Performance improvements are not limited to Macintosh, however. CS3 code has been optimized, improving performance on Windows machines as well and the performance enhancements also extend to Adobe Bridge.
Adobe CS3 Bridge
There are three programs in the Photoshop CS3 suite that work together to provide a digital photography workflow: Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop itself. The starting program of the workflow suite is Bridge, a standalone application that works faster and better than the CS2 version. It contains a downloader for transferring images from camera or card reader to your computer, and highly customizable options for viewing them and making culling decisions. You can nuke the bad shots and rank the good shots, rename the images in various ways and save them to disk in two different locations if you wish, such as a main drive and backup drive for safety. You can add metadata, such as your name, copyright information and keywords to all the images prior to transferring them. CS3 Bridge includes a new Loupe tool that lets you magnify parts of an image from 100 percent to 800 percent to check on critical sharpness. Bridge can also be used to batch convert images to other sizes and formats.
Adobe Camera Raw
Adobe Camera Raw, or ACR as it's often abbreviated, provides the foundation of a digital photography workflow. This core program, as the name indicates, converts a camera manufacturer's RAW files into a form that can be viewed and edited. ACR is used to make global adjustments to an image or set of images. In CS3, this has been extended to TIFF and JPG format as well. Despite its intuitive and easy-to-use interface, ACR packs a whollop. Its feature set is so rich and powerful that entire third-party books are available on squeezing out its full potential.
At its most basic level, ACR can be used to adjust colour temperature, tint, exposure, brightness and contrast. Its "Recover," "Fill Light" and "Blacks" sliders work like the Shadow/Highlight tool in Photoshop, helping bring back detail in underexposed dark areas and trimming back highlights in overexposed light areas. A new "Vibrance" slider works as a kind of "Smart Saturation" tool, making some colours more vibrant without disturbing others. The traditional Saturation glider is present as well. The greyscale conversion in ACR resembles the greyscale conversion in Lightroom, with multiple tonal sliders. With ACR, you can prep your images (including batch adjustments) to be optimized before they reach Photoshop for final polishing.
One of the most interesting features of the Photoshop CS3 suite is Photoshop's new ability to handle files as "Smart Objects." When a photo has been adjusted to your satisfaction in ACR, you can now open it in Photoshop in this new non-destructive mode, further applying "Smart Filters" to the photo. The flow from ACR to Photoshop can now resemble the non-destructive workflow of Aperture or Lightroom.
User Interface
A first look at the Photoshop component of the CS3 suite is startling - the user interface has been dramatically altered and simplified. Palettes are now contained in special docks that can be expanded and contracted, and the toolbar on the left has been shrunk to a single column located at the left border. This allows more space for the images as you work on them - a welcome change. Palettes can be torn off the dock and floated on the screen or combined with other palettes, and for anyone who finds the change too drastic, the interface can be switched back to "classic" mode. I liked the new interface as soon as I saw it. It's intuitive, attractive and the larger image working area is an improvement.
Small Enhancements
Let's start with some of the little improvements that might interest experienced Photoshop users: top on my list is the refined Curves tool. It now features a histogram behind the graph and a black-and-white slider under the graph, similar to Levels. There are a number of new presets available such as "Cross Process," "Darker," "Lighter," "Medium Contrast" and "Color Negative." An advanced control lets you to work in percentages of ink/pigment rather than light. A less obvious update has happened to the previously lame Brightness/Contrast tool. It's finally a simple way of adjusting brightness and contrast that doesn't mess up the distribution of values in your image. The "Channel Mixer" tool has sprouted six new presets: infrared, plus blue, green, orange, red and yellow filters. The infrared filter doesn't make anything look remotely like infrared, to my eye, but the others are useful starting points.
Black and White
For years, I've been perfecting my ability to convert digital colour images to convincing B&W in Photoshop. There are dozens of techniques and approaches to B&W conversion, and they may have all just been rendered unnecessary by CS3's new Black-and-White Conversion tool - an addition that was likely borrowed from Adobe Lightroom. I've been pitting this tool against my honed techniques from previous releases of Photoshop, and I haven't been able to significantly improve upon it. Worse, it's easy. Forget all the pain and esoteric knowledge - Adobe got it in one with this new addition. It's just plain good.
The Black-and-White tool is available both as a basic tool and as an adjustment layer. It offers 10 presets: Blue Filter, Green Filter, High Contrast Blue Filter, High Contrast Red Filter, Infrared, Maximum Black, Maximum White, Neutral Density, Red Filter and Yellow Filter. The tool itself has sliders for Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues and Magentas. By customizing the sliders, you can achieve very sophisticated tonal adjustments. You can also tint your B&W's and control the saturation of the tint. And did I mention it's easy? If this tool doesn't tempt you to create sumptuous B&W images, stick with red and yellow tulips.
Quick Selection and Refine Edge
If you've ever wished for a Magic Wand tool that really worked, or at least worked better, you'll find it in the new Quick Selection tool. Just click the tool on something in your photo and drag, pressing left bracket and right bracket to decrease or increase the size of the brush. It can do most of the selection work for you, relatively accurately. Then click the Refine Edge tool to finesse the selection, all the while previewing the results in a number of optional ways. At last, you can preview the effects of feathering - something that had previously been a trial-and-error procedure. The Quick Selection won't help with very delicate, fine detail, but it gets you into the ballpark in a hurry. If you've been reluctant about extensive selecting in the past, this addition may spur you onto trying some photocompositing - creating an image from bits of several other images.
Easier Compositing
Auto-Align Layers can align layer elements based on similarities, such as corners and edges. It can be used for compositing elements from several layers to create a photomontage, or to create panoramic images from several images. One such use for this, outlined in the CS3 online help, is for group portraits in which one person blinked. If there's another shot with the person not blinking, it can be used to replace the blinking person in the otherwise good group shot.
Improved 32-bit HDR
Photographers who strive to achieve High Dynamic Range photos by combining different shots of a subject taken with different exposures will find a few improvements in 32-bit editing and Merge to HDR. 32-bit images can contain layers with layer masks and certain filters. In addition, a 32-bit image can be retouched with updated versions of core tools such as Brush, Pencil, Blur, Sharpen, Gradient, Smudge and Pattern Stamp. Merge to HDR can now store response curves for each of the cameras you shoot with.
Smart Filters
Compared to some of the newer photo editing and workflow products on the market, such as Aperture and Lightroom, Photoshop has lagged in the area of non-destructive editing. Photoshop is catching up with its new Smart Filters that let you add, adjust and remove filters from an image without having to resave the image or start over to preserve image quality. As with Lightroom modules, you can apply filters to visualize changes and experiment with an image without altering original pixel data. Unfortunately, not all filter effects can be used on 16-bit images, but all are available while editing 8-bit images.
Bottom Line
Although Adobe Photoshop CS3 Standard is an expensive program ($740 or $240 for an upgrade), it easily retains its status as the premier photo editor of the industry. For any photographer working seriously with layer adjustments, fine selections, composite images, and extensive third-party plugins, Photoshop has no peer. The CS3 version has brought welcome improvements and spruced-up workflow options. Nonetheless, for many photographers, these features are overkill. If your photographic needs are simply to get image files sorted and organized, adjusted a bit in terms of contrast, tone and tint, and sharpened a little for printing, then a dedicated digital photography workflow suite such as Aperture or Lightroom may be a more appropriate product for you. If you need some, but not all, of the layer-based features of Photoshop, then Photoshop Elements ($130) may meet your needs. But for photographers who consistently draw on its deep set of features, Photoshop CS3 is the best Photoshop yet.
As digital photography evolves, the trend in digital editing has been towards providing the photographer with a workflow: selecting and transferring images from a camera or card reader, sorting and organizing them, then editing them for various outputs including prints and posting on the web. While Adobe Photoshop has been the industry's premier graphics editor for years, it has lagged behind other products such as Aperture and Lightroom in providing the photographer a complete workflow and ease-of-use features specifically focused on photography rather than graphic arts.
Consequently, each successive release of Photoshop has seen Adobe add additional or improved features related specifically to digital photography. Photoshop CS3 offers a strong list of new and improved features designed to help professional and advanced amateur photographers develop a workflow and take image preparation to its maximum potential. There are two versions of Photoshop CS3: Standard CS3 and CS3 Extended. Photoshop CS3, which is the focus of this review, is the basic upgrade from CS2. CS3 Extended includes advanced features for those working with videos and 3D applications. Those features will not be discussed here.
For Mac users, Photoshop CS3 now runs Intel-native code, allowing Intel-based Macs to run the program faster and more stably than CS2. Performance improvements are not limited to Macintosh, however. CS3 code has been optimized, improving performance on Windows machines as well and the performance enhancements also extend to Adobe Bridge.
Adobe CS3 Bridge
There are three programs in the Photoshop CS3 suite that work together to provide a digital photography workflow: Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop itself. The starting program of the workflow suite is Bridge, a standalone application that works faster and better than the CS2 version. It contains a downloader for transferring images from camera or card reader to your computer, and highly customizable options for viewing them and making culling decisions. You can nuke the bad shots and rank the good shots, rename the images in various ways and save them to disk in two different locations if you wish, such as a main drive and backup drive for safety. You can add metadata, such as your name, copyright information and keywords to all the images prior to transferring them. CS3 Bridge includes a new Loupe tool that lets you magnify parts of an image from 100 percent to 800 percent to check on critical sharpness. Bridge can also be used to batch convert images to other sizes and formats.
Adobe Camera Raw
Adobe Camera Raw, or ACR as it's often abbreviated, provides the foundation of a digital photography workflow. This core program, as the name indicates, converts a camera manufacturer's RAW files into a form that can be viewed and edited. ACR is used to make global adjustments to an image or set of images. In CS3, this has been extended to TIFF and JPG format as well. Despite its intuitive and easy-to-use interface, ACR packs a whollop. Its feature set is so rich and powerful that entire third-party books are available on squeezing out its full potential.
At its most basic level, ACR can be used to adjust colour temperature, tint, exposure, brightness and contrast. Its "Recover," "Fill Light" and "Blacks" sliders work like the Shadow/Highlight tool in Photoshop, helping bring back detail in underexposed dark areas and trimming back highlights in overexposed light areas. A new "Vibrance" slider works as a kind of "Smart Saturation" tool, making some colours more vibrant without disturbing others. The traditional Saturation glider is present as well. The greyscale conversion in ACR resembles the greyscale conversion in Lightroom, with multiple tonal sliders. With ACR, you can prep your images (including batch adjustments) to be optimized before they reach Photoshop for final polishing.
One of the most interesting features of the Photoshop CS3 suite is Photoshop's new ability to handle files as "Smart Objects." When a photo has been adjusted to your satisfaction in ACR, you can now open it in Photoshop in this new non-destructive mode, further applying "Smart Filters" to the photo. The flow from ACR to Photoshop can now resemble the non-destructive workflow of Aperture or Lightroom.
User Interface
A first look at the Photoshop component of the CS3 suite is startling - the user interface has been dramatically altered and simplified. Palettes are now contained in special docks that can be expanded and contracted, and the toolbar on the left has been shrunk to a single column located at the left border. This allows more space for the images as you work on them - a welcome change. Palettes can be torn off the dock and floated on the screen or combined with other palettes, and for anyone who finds the change too drastic, the interface can be switched back to "classic" mode. I liked the new interface as soon as I saw it. It's intuitive, attractive and the larger image working area is an improvement.
Small Enhancements
Let's start with some of the little improvements that might interest experienced Photoshop users: top on my list is the refined Curves tool. It now features a histogram behind the graph and a black-and-white slider under the graph, similar to Levels. There are a number of new presets available such as "Cross Process," "Darker," "Lighter," "Medium Contrast" and "Color Negative." An advanced control lets you to work in percentages of ink/pigment rather than light. A less obvious update has happened to the previously lame Brightness/Contrast tool. It's finally a simple way of adjusting brightness and contrast that doesn't mess up the distribution of values in your image. The "Channel Mixer" tool has sprouted six new presets: infrared, plus blue, green, orange, red and yellow filters. The infrared filter doesn't make anything look remotely like infrared, to my eye, but the others are useful starting points.
Black and White
For years, I've been perfecting my ability to convert digital colour images to convincing B&W in Photoshop. There are dozens of techniques and approaches to B&W conversion, and they may have all just been rendered unnecessary by CS3's new Black-and-White Conversion tool - an addition that was likely borrowed from Adobe Lightroom. I've been pitting this tool against my honed techniques from previous releases of Photoshop, and I haven't been able to significantly improve upon it. Worse, it's easy. Forget all the pain and esoteric knowledge - Adobe got it in one with this new addition. It's just plain good.
The Black-and-White tool is available both as a basic tool and as an adjustment layer. It offers 10 presets: Blue Filter, Green Filter, High Contrast Blue Filter, High Contrast Red Filter, Infrared, Maximum Black, Maximum White, Neutral Density, Red Filter and Yellow Filter. The tool itself has sliders for Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues and Magentas. By customizing the sliders, you can achieve very sophisticated tonal adjustments. You can also tint your B&W's and control the saturation of the tint. And did I mention it's easy? If this tool doesn't tempt you to create sumptuous B&W images, stick with red and yellow tulips.
Quick Selection and Refine Edge
If you've ever wished for a Magic Wand tool that really worked, or at least worked better, you'll find it in the new Quick Selection tool. Just click the tool on something in your photo and drag, pressing left bracket and right bracket to decrease or increase the size of the brush. It can do most of the selection work for you, relatively accurately. Then click the Refine Edge tool to finesse the selection, all the while previewing the results in a number of optional ways. At last, you can preview the effects of feathering - something that had previously been a trial-and-error procedure. The Quick Selection won't help with very delicate, fine detail, but it gets you into the ballpark in a hurry. If you've been reluctant about extensive selecting in the past, this addition may spur you onto trying some photocompositing - creating an image from bits of several other images.
Easier Compositing
Auto-Align Layers can align layer elements based on similarities, such as corners and edges. It can be used for compositing elements from several layers to create a photomontage, or to create panoramic images from several images. One such use for this, outlined in the CS3 online help, is for group portraits in which one person blinked. If there's another shot with the person not blinking, it can be used to replace the blinking person in the otherwise good group shot.
Improved 32-bit HDR
Photographers who strive to achieve High Dynamic Range photos by combining different shots of a subject taken with different exposures will find a few improvements in 32-bit editing and Merge to HDR. 32-bit images can contain layers with layer masks and certain filters. In addition, a 32-bit image can be retouched with updated versions of core tools such as Brush, Pencil, Blur, Sharpen, Gradient, Smudge and Pattern Stamp. Merge to HDR can now store response curves for each of the cameras you shoot with.
Smart Filters
Compared to some of the newer photo editing and workflow products on the market, such as Aperture and Lightroom, Photoshop has lagged in the area of non-destructive editing. Photoshop is catching up with its new Smart Filters that let you add, adjust and remove filters from an image without having to resave the image or start over to preserve image quality. As with Lightroom modules, you can apply filters to visualize changes and experiment with an image without altering original pixel data. Unfortunately, not all filter effects can be used on 16-bit images, but all are available while editing 8-bit images.
Bottom Line
Although Adobe Photoshop CS3 Standard is an expensive program ($740 or $240 for an upgrade), it easily retains its status as the premier photo editor of the industry. For any photographer working seriously with layer adjustments, fine selections, composite images, and extensive third-party plugins, Photoshop has no peer. The CS3 version has brought welcome improvements and spruced-up workflow options. Nonetheless, for many photographers, these features are overkill. If your photographic needs are simply to get image files sorted and organized, adjusted a bit in terms of contrast, tone and tint, and sharpened a little for printing, then a dedicated digital photography workflow suite such as Aperture or Lightroom may be a more appropriate product for you. If you need some, but not all, of the layer-based features of Photoshop, then Photoshop Elements ($130) may meet your needs. But for photographers who consistently draw on its deep set of features, Photoshop CS3 is the best Photoshop yet.
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