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Adobe PhotoShop is (one of) the most hefty professional image editors on the market, with powerful editing and vector-drawing tools and countless third-party plugins. It integrates seamlessly with Adobe's other major design applications, such as Adobe Illustrator 10.0 or Adobe InDesign. Adobe did a great marketing job for their Acrobat application by releasing Acrobat Reader in the public domain thus making their proprietary pdf format a de-facto standard for paperless documents. (By the way, if you don't know yet, it is now possible to convert your documents to pdf format online, using their Web-based service.) Just as cunningly they marketed PhotoShop: by letting people download the evaluation - or tryout, as they call it - version for free, they built up an immense user base.
They swiftly jumped on the bandwagon of the new - digital - era in photography: the dawning of digital cameras with photos that can be immediately uploaded to your computer and edited on-the-fly, for which powerful software, matching the powerful new hardware, was needed. Despite its exorbitant price which should place it in the professional niche, Adobe PhotoShop is targeted just as much at the home user, the amateur and the dedicated hobbyist - a growing, incomparably larger consumer market than the professional market could even dream of becoming.
With the file browser, browsing through your pictures is greatly simplified: you browse through thumbnails and modify them (rotate etc.) in a sort of preview mode. The Healing Brush, used to restore image flaws, is a definite improvement over the Stamp Tool. The Scripting support is an even more powerful and configurable tool than Actions.
Software Review - Pros
You can download the evaluation version;
it is cross-platform;
countless useful features and sophisticated effects, such as color correction, rounding corners, liquify, blur, sharpen, photo text, motion blur, glowing edges, and so on, and so on;
many third-party plug-ins, filters, brushes, textures, patterns, styles, templates, backgrounds and other elements available;
the Healing Brush, the Patch tool, the Scripting support, the instant color adjustment, the file browser...;
it's becoming the de-facto standard, as some Microsoft's appz, so it will be ever tougher to avoid. Still think it's you, the consumer, who ultimately decides what to buy and what not to buy on the free (free?!?!) market? Think again!
Software Review - Cons
A bulky 41 MB download (v6.0);
on my system, it crashes from time to time, making you lose all your unsaved work, which may be a bit annoying;
Adobe PhotoShop is getting bigger, hungrier, more complex and much harder to use with each new version: it requires more resources, more knowledge, more time, and more money - without a matching improvement in features and, which may be even worse, at the expense of a marked degradation in performance;
so complex and sophisticated, it's not easy to get the hang of. For many (simpler) tasks, it is simply too time-consuming to use: for example, you'll hardly find anything in version 7.0 that you couldn't accomplish (and faster, too) with, say, version 5 - a common trait it shares with many other overbloated (which is to say, of the Microsoft school) appz;
while Adobe PhotoShop is currently the best software for photo retouching, it might not be just the right tool for a creative artist who is into digital painting;
reported some glitches with the Burn tool in v7.0;
still not the best filesize compressor around. If you want to fine-tune image sizes for the Web, turn to dedicated, stand-alone tools;
rather slow, on slow machines: moreover, according to the documentation, you must have at least a P-III-class machine to run v7.0 (what about non-Intel platforms?).
User Report - Tips, Tricks and Tweaks
General
Some filters like the render filters are disabled in CMYK. So how do you use them while working in CMYK mode? Work in RGB mode with CMYK preview turned on (ctrl-y), then when you are finished, convert it to CMYK. This will allow all the filters to work, give you a smaller file size to work on and you won't "lose" your colors when you convert it.
jpeg (Joint Photographic Expert Group), png or gif? If the image doesn't have too many colors - for instance, if it contains large areas of solid color or simple repeating patterns - use gif: it will be converted to 256 colors, which is as far as gif will go. If on the other hand, the image is complex, like a photograph, use jpeg.
As a rule, when saving as a jpeg, never use more than 50, preferably 60-70 compression. You don't have to compress files, to be sure. If compared to the bmp format - as you surely know - the jpeg format produces far smaller files even if you use no compression at all. Of course, by blurring the image a bit you can reduce the file size further, at the expense of the image quality.
For the web, use RGB and save as a jpeg if it's a photo. If you want tranparency, you will have to use gif or png. If you need animation - gif. For print use CMYK and save as either a tiff or an eps.
For most print purposes 300 dpi should suffice. To print to an inkjet only, use RGB at 150 dpi. For Web use, save at 72 dpi.
PhotoShop keeps forgetting your settings? Most problems can be fixed simply by deleting the preferences file and restarting PhotoShop. The file can be found in Windows\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop\6.0\Adobe Photoshop 6 Settings. You can now even reset them on startup by holding down ctrl-alt-shift. Before you try this at home, though, save your custom patterns, actions, styles, brushes, gradients, shapes and color pallettes. In Adobe PhotoShop 6.0 you can record an Action to set preferences. Start with the default preferences and begin recording an Action, open Preferences and make any changes you wish, then stop recording and name your Action. You can even assign it a function key, if you wish.
To be fast, travel light: reduce file sizes to speed up work. Even what you can't see is affecting your file sizes. If you have imported an image that is larger than your canvas size, select all and crop: you will be surprised how much you can save. Also delete unwanted layers, they can add up a lot too.
Create effects on the layer mask, so you don't modify the picture itself. If you press ctrl-click on the Layer Mask in the palette, you select the final effect; then you can create a new layer and fill it with the border. To try several effects, create several layers filled with the saved selection. You can then select one effect or more (they are stacked).
Notice: The preceding consumer review, as well as the humble and not too original tips 'n' tricks, have no intention of replacing a real tutorial or, better still, a good manual - a must if you intend to use such complex software proficiently. I would even say that, the more complex the software, the more inevitably you need a good manual.
Suggested Further Reading
Now, if I were asked to decide, right here on the spot, which rules do I abide by in this unruly software world, there are actually no more than two that come immediately to mind:
never buy the newest version of a pricey software tool, unless it is a virus checker, but rather find a discounted older version (featurewise, they rarely differ); and
when you must buy a pricey software tool, never let its power lay wasted and unused for lack of information: get a good manual/tutorial and you'll never regret it. A very good resource for average home users and professional users alike, "Photo Retouching With Adobe Photoshop" is probably everything you'll ever need to get the hang of Adobe PhotoShop and its countless features & elements (& quirks;). At least, it certainly works for me: I just keep returning to it again and again, always discovering some new tip, some unknown shortcut or some new technique. You can buy it at a 30% discount tag at www.alphacraze.com.
