Photoshop CS review

Lori Grunin CNET

Published: 16 Jan 2004

Thanks to Adobe's continued refinement of Photoshop, the program retains its position as the essential image-editing tool for graphics professionals as part of the Adobe Creative Suite family. Although Photoshop CS offers only a handful of new capabilities, they are important: increased support for 16-bit images, better colour-correction and image-adjustment tools, nested layer sets, the ability to edit text on a path, non-square-pixel preview, SWF export (in ImageReady) and variables for dynamic Web content (in ImageReady).

Most serious users will find at least one feature that justifies the upgrade, despite its steep £146.88 (inc. VAT) price. But using these tools correctly still takes some finesse; if you're in imaging for the fun rather than the high-quality output or money, you're probably better off with one of the cheaper alternatives, such as Jasc’s PaintShop Pro, Ulead’s PhotoImpact, or Photoshop Elements.

Setup & interface

The Photoshop CS install process is best described as ‘routine’, and wary upgraders will be reassured to know that Photoshop CS happily coexisted with version 7.0 as well as previous versions of other Adobe applications during our tests. Other supporting files, such as custom Actions, also migrated without problem. Adobe now requires that you activate Photoshop CS within a month of installation, a relatively painless procedure. Of course, you never know the real hassle quotient of a product's activation scheme until you've upgraded hard disks a few times. Click here for more information on activation.

Aside from a new Welcome screen that provides a launching point for new or bewildered users, little has changed in the way Photoshop looks or operates. There are now more dialogue boxes that allow you to toggle between simple and advanced views, which may make Photoshop a little easier for some users. But many new capabilities appear in places that make more sense to engineers than to artists; for example, ‘Export layers to files’ appears under Scripts in the File menu rather than under Export or on the Layers palette. Add this confusing configuration to the offences from previous versions -- such as the placement of Extract under the Filter menu instead of the Image menu -- as well as the program's innate complexity, and Photoshop's learning curve remains steep. Adobe has also improved Photoshop CS integration with ImageReady CS, an application used to prepare Web graphics. But ImageReady CS remains a separate program -- an irritating speed bump on the productivity treadmill.

Features

Some of Photoshop's new capabilities will brighten every user's day. Although targeted primarily at graphic designers, we think that with a little imagination, most people will derive some value from Layer Comps, which lets you define sets of visible layers for easy version comparison. Also, the ability to layer comes in quite handy if you routinely work on complex files, regardless of content type. Photoshop CS integrates InDesign's type engine, which vastly improves the program's type handling and quality, and lets you fit text to a curve. We also like the ability to stack, rearrange and preview stylistic filter operations with the Filter Gallery.

The slightly revamped File Browser works more like a light table, allowing you to move thumbnails around, and a variety of menu options make it quicker to access common file-related tasks. In addition, you can now customise the keyboard shortcuts. Adobe has also improved import and export to PDF within Photoshop.

Serious photographers and videographers will probably want to upgrade just for Photoshop CS's extended 16-bit colour support: Photoshop can now preserve 16-bit data from input, through colour and exposure correction, to output. Adobe has also updated and integrated the very useful plug-in for camera RAW files. New shadow/highlight correction tools provide an easy but powerful approach to exposure adjustment. The ability to preview using non-square pixels and preset guide layouts are a couple of additional crumbs that Adobe throws to videographers and DVD authors.

Unfortunately, some new aspects of the software still feel undercooked. The underlying XML architecture has considerable potential but currently requires you to put in too much work for simple keywording and file management. And tools within ImageReady, a separate program included with Photoshop, should be integrated into Photoshop by now. But they're not, which presents all sorts of irritations and inconsistencies. For instance, ImageReady now has Conditional Actions: you can insert some basic logic into the macros to handle basic cases such as ‘if the image width is greater than x, do y’. This can be very powerful, but it's not available in Photoshop. ImageReady can also export to SWF, but to work with the results in Flash, you must export each desired object into a separate file. Alas, the JavaScript support that would greatly streamline this procedure (exporting Layer Comps to files) works only in Photoshop.

Don't look to Photoshop CS for speed improvements over version 7.0. We ran our standard test Action -- a script of common work-flow tasks -- over a directory of 25 mid-size TIFF files and a directory of 16 smaller JPEG files on a Power Mac dual 2GHz G5 with 2GB of RAM and a 2.2GHz Athlon 64 FX51 with 1GB of RAM. The TIFF-based Action ran slower in CS than in version 7.01 on both platforms; there was as much as a 16 percent gap between versions on the Mac. With the JPEG files, CS ran 20 percent faster than version 7.01 under Windows, but 6 percent slower on the Mac.

Service & support

Adobe offers free technical support for Photoshop CS, although you will have to pay for any call charges. However, there's a ton of free online help available for Photoshop users. In addition to the Adobe Studio site, which delivers tips, tutorials and tools, Adobe's user-to-user forums are monitored by competent support staff and offer a good track record. Adobe's knowledge base has rarely disappointed us.

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