I
have to admit that I’ve never shot a series of scenic
images — of a beach, or a mountain range or even a
cityscape — and then tried to fit them together so
that they overlap into a panorama that looks like something
from an early wide-screen movie shot in Cinemascope or Cinerama.
It’s
not something that has ever interested me and seemed largely
a trick, although I’ve seen some pretty startling
results from others. The closest I’ve ever come is through
cropping hard on the top and bottom of a wide-angle photo of
the local yacht club with snow-dappled mountains in the background.
 But I may have had my mind changed for me. I’ve just
finished taking a hands-on run through of Photoshop CS3 Extended,
a tour put together by Adobe for those reviewers who want to
get a quick hit of the venerable software’s latest features,
before reporting on them.
One of these new items is the ability,
through what’s called Photomerge,
to do much more than just pull a series shots together into a whole, which you’ve
been able to accomplish in previous versions of Photoshop.
Now, using Photomerge
in Extended — the flagship (and most expensive) version
of Photoshop CS3 — you can also match the lighting of one shot to another
instantly as the shots blend, which makes the resulting image seamless. A single
click and you’re done, as they say.
And this has left me tempted to rush
down to the shoreline near my house and grab some shots of the stretch of kayaks
laid out on the rocky beach in front
of the canoe rental place and then, with that aforementioned click or two,
snap them together into something eye popping.
But that’s Photoshop for you – a
program so jammed with features
that you’re likely going to use just a fraction of them, at best a tenth,
in your entire life. That’s especially if you’re not a professional,
but a hit-and-miss amateur like me, who often retreats to more focussed programs
like Bibble or Lightroom or Raw Developer designed to adjust RAW images to the
point where it looks like I actually know what I’m doing when I’m
behind the lens.
 But that hasn’t stopped Adobe in its relentless upgrading
of Photoshop, offering features that eventually make their way into the more
amateur oriented
Photoshop Elements.
And I’ve had quite the little adventure over the past
day, taking Photoshop CS3 Extended out for a spin, though what I’m about
to say is more in the form of a report than a review. I’ll leave the
latter to the other folks at Megapixel.net, who do things, like their highly
respected camera reviews,
in a far more scientific and methodical manner than I ever could.
First thing
that Adobe wanted to draw my attention to was that it now has smart filters
that are non-destructive. In other words, you can fool around
(well,
Adobe likes the term “experiment”) with by applying various filters
and then remove them, without having to back up and start over again with the
original image. And the smart filters have their own layer mask, letting you
adjust the filters on different areas of the image. Neat, as they say.
 There’s
also a new tool called Quick Selection and Adobe walked me through the process
by letting me work on the image of a young man standing in front
of a brick wall. All I had to do was to put the cursor up at the top of his head
and drag down his body. And, as I do this Photoshop analyzes the photo and selects
excises the brick wall, leaving me with just the young man alone. No more agonizingly
trying (and when it comes to this I’m all thumbs, so to speak) to outline
the region of the image I want. After that, I could expand or contract the area
selected by holding down modifier keys. This I did find difficult, but I’ve
seen much more experienced users do it with ease, so it must be my technique,
something like learning to play golf (well, that takes years, so lets hope it
requires less time than that).
There is yet another new feature, called Refine
Edge, that permits smoothing,
feathering, contracting or expanding.
I can’t imagine that a lot of amateurs
would make the effort to use the automatic layer alignment and blending feature,
but it did fascinate me. Basically,
it lets you take, say, two images (the family portrait where your cousin Bart
isn’t blinking with the one where Aunt Maude has her mouth closed for once)
and combine them into a decent shot you can send to all the relatives.
Not to
get too technical about this, you place multiple related images on separate
layers then let Photopshop CS3 analyse the contents and do
the layer blending
so that the colour and shading are automatically merged seamlessly into the
image you want. While you could do this image combination
technique before in older
Photoshop versions, it would take you a heck of a lot longer.
Photoshop CS3 also
takes the Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush a step further through options
in the new Clone Source palette. Now you can not only paint with
an image sample, but also maintain the texture and shading in the area where
you’re working.
The Overlay option gives you a clear look at the source
pixels under the brush so you can be extremely accurate when you select the
brush stroke destination.
As well, you can set an offset, width, height and rotation for the source area.
That means you can transform the cloned area as you clone with it. And if that
wasn’t enough, you can set up five different source points and change from
one to another to another with a mouseclick.
When it comes to using Curves, I’m
a hit and miss kind of guy, so the new colour-corrected pre-sets, allowing automatic
adjustments, are a help. As well,
(since we’re all a little forgetful) you can create your own pre-sets so
that you can achieve identical results consistently over time. And the CS3 Curves
display is larger and incorporates an integrated histogram and simultaneous display
of multiple colour channels.
 The first time I encountered Adobe Bridge I was not,
well, overwhelmed by its usefulness. Quite simply, I hate firing up two programs
where one will do, but
of course if you’re going to buy a suite of the Adobe products then it’s
essential. It’s just that most amateurs satisfy themselves with Photoshop
alone.
The CS3 version of Bridge, however, integrates seamlessly
with Photoshop and
I hardly even knew it was there, especially since it’s now much more speedy,
especially since it runs native on my Intel Mac. In addition it has added, three
column layout, saved workplaces, a new filters panel that lets you find images
quickly, stacks that let you compress a series of images into a single thumbnail
and then expand the images again in a single click and a new loupe tool that
lets you instantly zoom in and out of your images.
I was also happy to see that
the tools palette is single column and the other palettes are in self-adjusting
docks that let you expand or contract them with
the tab key. If you keep the palette dock hidden, all you have to do to reveal
it is move your mouse to the edge of the screen. And you can store your workspaces
as presets and then call them up using the Workspace menu button on the options
bar.
I have at least half a dozen programs — excessive and stupid I know,
but
I’m a compulsive purchaser of digital imaging software -- I use to transform
RAW files into TIFFs or JPEGs so I would never use this ability in Photoshop,
but for lots of people this is the only way they handle things. So they’ll
be glad to know that Adobe’s Camera Raw not only comes with a performance
boost but also a non-destructive clone and heal tool, new fill-light and vibrance
controls and precise colour adjustme
Camera Raw also has monochrome conversion
built-in, so you can make those black and white versions of your RAW images
look as good as possible. My daughter once
set me the task of converting a colour photo of her and my granddaughter into
monochrome to match a photo taken more than 30 years ago, in black and white,
for a newspaper article I wrote. This new tool would have made that much easer
(to say nothing of independent plug-ins that match old black and white film
settings and even grain, of which more in a later column.)
Finally, there’s good
integration with Adobe Lightoom, if you happen to
own that program.
Finally, there are, in Photoshop CS3 Extended things I will
never use like 3D imaging and texture editing, motion graphics and video layers
and Movie Paint
(which lets you use painting, retouching and pixel-level editing to the frames
of a movie file).
One strong piece of advice, before you buy Photoshop CS3,
do check which of the
two versions has which features. There’s no need to buy, say, Extended
if all you want is the basics. At the same time you don’t want to purchase
the basic version of Photoshop if there’s something, like Movie Paint,
that you truly think you’re going to need.
If you want to make sure, go
to www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/compare/ where
the features of each are laid out side by side.
Links to Peter's previous commentaries:
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