By Fred Thorlin
Adobe Photoshop 5.0 is the most stable, productive and expensive image editor I have ever worked with. In all my ham-handed experimenting and exploring in its unfamiliar environment, it never crashed. Once I stopped poking around and set myself a task, I was able to complete it in an amazingly short time. If you qualify for the $195 upgrade price, the decision to purchase it is a no-brainer.
The task I pursued to familiarize myself with Adobe Photoshop 5.0 was to assemble a collection of pictures I had taken with a digital camera into a meaningful composite on a single page. This involved using a wide range of image editing capabilities to make up for my inability as a photographer. The toughest part was the first step. I decided to tile the background with a picture of the graduation program. The way I was used to doing it didn’t work. I tried the Help system. There I found the instruction “Filling with patterns is discussed in the following procedures.” I nearly went nuts rereading the remaining instructions on the page to no avail. In desperation I clicked the “>>” button where I found “To fill a selection with a pattern” which described the procedure in terms a smart mockingbird could follow.
I need to digress on to the subject of documentation. It rarely gets the effort put into it it deserves probably because the people who created the program are rarely endowed with great communication skills and the Marketing department has told themselves enough times that the user interface is so “intuitive” that they can’t justify to themselves the dollar or time cost for developing a good documentation set. The best documentation I have seen in this product category was the tutorial video tape that came with Corel Draw 1.0. Photoshop 5.0 lacks this but it sets a high standard. One of the two CDs making up the product is devoted to introductory material. Several movies provide demonstrations of features of the product which provide a context for the tutorials included in Adobe Acrobat format. There is a good User Guide which is a subset of the on-line Help file. The hardcopy is appreciated. Summarily, the Photoshop people have taken documentation seriously, and it pays off in getting users up to speed quickly.
The next step in the creation of my composite was to cut out the important segments of my images so they can be positioned on my background. I was prepared to use a “magic wand” and twiddle the results until I got the results I wanted. Having done this before and knowing how much time it takes I put it off for several days. Guilt finally drove me to pursue the task. I decided to give the “magnetic wand” a spin. It was magic. A task I had spent hours on in former projects was done in less than a half hour. The magnetic wand lets you draw the outline of the area you want to select and determines the area you wanted to select. It searches for boundaries close to where you draw and snaps to them. Using this I cut nine images out and placed them on top of my background.
At this point I have ten layers in my image, the background and each of the cutouts. Each of the upper layers can be dragged to any position above the background. The order of the layers can be changed.
Most importantly each of the layers can be edited separately.
Before pasting the layers onto the background I had adjusted the contrast and brightness of each image. Unfortunately my keen eye didn’t adjust them all to similar levels. Wandering around the menus led me to something called AutoLevels. This “defines the lightest and darkest pixels in each channel as white and black and then redistribute the intermediate pixel values proportionately.” It is close enough to magic for me.
Adobe is best known for their work with handling type. You have heard of Postscript? Type is handled with appropriate skill and power in this Adobe product. When you add text to an image you create a text layer. As you enter your text into the Type Tool it appears in a preview area and on the image. Strangely, if you choose a color the color only appears on the image. After closing the Type Tool you can treat it like an image and apply a range of effects to it including beveling, embossing, shadowing and glows.
I was dazzled by the results I obtained. I think you will be too.
This product is not for the short of RAM; 32 MB is the minimum. One way Photoshop uses RAM is to retain a history of each step you took in developing your image... and it lets revert to, or copy from any of these earlier editions of your creation. It won’t go infinitely far back, but the more RAM you have the further it will go.
A really clever feature incorporated into this version of Photoshop allows you to do 3-D editing of a 2-D image. The way it works is you identify to Photoshop the outline of the box, sphere or cylinder. Cylinders can be distorted to accommodate bottles. Multiple objects can be selected. You then drag the superimposed wire frames to rotate the object around any axis. While you cannot rotate the object very far, the effect you do see in real-time is impressive and the results are usable.
If you would like some first hand experience with Photoshop before buying the product, you can download a demonstration version of Adobe Photoshop 4.0 at www.adobe.com. This is not the version I am discussing here and it does not include all of the goodies of the production version or allow the saving of files or the printing of output.
I have only mentioned the few elements of Photoshop I encountered in this exercise. There are dozens and dozens of additional image editing features included with the product. If you need even more features you can explore the Photoshop plug-in market; these are features created by third parties which are tightly integrated with the Photoshop environment.
Adobe Photoshop 5.0 lacks some of the sexiness of some consumer priced packages which would be helpful. For example, batch creation of thumbnails and before and after views of compression effects would be handy.
Overall it presents a very civilized and responsive environment. It is easy to understand why it is the first choice of most computer artists.
Fred Thorlin is president of Personal Instruments, Inc. The Houston, Texas based company does Visual Basic development and consulting. You may contact him at fredt@hal-pc.org.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.