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Photoshop 7.0

It’s more power to your elbow! Dave Cook brushes with the industry’s leading image-editing software.

Once any successful application reaches the second digit of the second hand, its creator can expect a certain amount of user apathy. Companies like Adobe need users to upgrade, but how can it manage that when those same users are reasonably happy with their present setup?

By far and away the best solution is to provide new ways to increase productivity, and to offer punters a better range of tools than the ones they’re using now. In Photoshop 7.0, Adobe has largely succeeded in both of these departments with an impressive list of new tools and enhancements.

File Browsing

Due to the size of today’s hard disks it’s now more difficult than ever to keep track of saved images. Step forward Photoshop’s new File Browser. Readily available via a tab situated at the top right corner of the screen, the File Browser lets you search for images visually using thumbnails, rather than by filename alone.

Having found the image, the Details pane or the Metadata pane provides information on the file in a flash. The Metadata pane is particularly useful since it offers information on image size, bit depth, and resolution, as well as associated captions, and keywords.

The File Browser can be a boon when working with digital cameras. For example, some digital cameras use EXIF (Exchangeable Image Files) to store information regarding the creation date, exposure settings, image size, and so forth. If you own such a camera, the good news is that Photoshop 7.0 supports this feature.

Photoshop 7.0 includes numerous time saving features. One example is the Batch Rename tool, which offers a quick and easy solution to renaming multiple files.

Editing

Few would argue that Photoshop has long been the industry’s most powerful image-editing software. With the introduction of the new Healing Brush and Patch tool, Photoshop’s toolset is now even more comprehensive.

Using the Healing Brush, annoying artefacts such as wrinkles, scratches, and blemishes can be removed in seconds. Its main advantage to other cloning tools is that, when cloning layers or images, it automatically preserves important attributes such as shading, lighting, and texture.

The Patch tool lets you work even more precisely. It’s perfect, for example, when removing wrinkles from around the eyes - otherwise known as laughter lines or crows’ feet. In practice, both the Healing Brush and Patch tool are far more effective than Photoshop’s old cloning tools

Further editing enhancements include the new Auto Colour feature. Unlike the Auto Contrast and Auto Level options, tweaking with the Auto Colour tool invariably produces a more realistic output when working on most image-types. 

Other Enhancements

Sharing images online is now safer thanks to several new security enhancements. There’s full support for the security settings found in Acrobat 5.0, and you can require a password to open a Photoshop PDF file. Support is also there for XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform). This means you can index Internet search engines to point at your Photoshop files with a few chosen keywords.

Among a range of other enhancements, this release sees a new paint engine for simulating painting techniques with wet and dry brush effects. There’s also a built-in spell checker, plus a welcome release of ImageReady 7 to help automate the preparation of repetitive artwork.

Verdict

If image-editing is your game then Photoshop 7.0 beats the competition by the proverbial mile. It’s enormously powerful and moderately easy to use. The Healing Brush and related Patch tool are in themselves two good enough reasons to upgrade.

The program’s main downside is its high price. Although the upgrade option is considerably cheaper, a full version of Photoshop 7.0 is probably too expensive for most home users.

Dave Cook

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