TecKMagazine - Adobe Photoshop CS3 Review

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Review

Written by Don Lee
Monday, 19 November 2007
Photoshop CS3 is the crown jewel of Adobe latest Creative Suite package. As the de facto standard application for design professionals, Photoshop CS3 was highly anticipated for a number of improvements and a slew of new features. Personally, I was looking forward to some tool enhancements, which would help me complete my projects quicker but with the same high quality. Here is what I discovered about Adobe Photoshop CS3. After launching the program, you see the new look workspace that you find in the other CS3 programs such as Illustrator. For those of us who have to work on a single nineteen inch monitor, I need to utilize my space as much as possible and to be able to customize my palettes and the area they take up. Now I am not familiar with the use of Camera Raw but after working with it, I can see the power of it. Camera Raw can open JPEGs and TIFFs and you can enhance your photos with a variety of settings. I was amazed on how well it can improve exposure and create a more vibrant photo. I can see this being pretty useful for photographers. Another new feature in Photoshop CS3 is the use of Smart Filters. When I gave this a try, I was absolutely amazed. This is like having your filters on its own layer instead of being applied to the main layer. Smart Filters will remind users of the implementation of style layers. Now before you can implement Smart Filters, you need to convert your layer to a Smart Object. Once you do that, you can apply any filter to that layer without changing the original layer. You can also adjust the stack of filters as well as turn off or adjust the settings for any of the applied filters. This is wildly cool and efficient because now you don’t have to worry about a filter being permanent and having to redo your work if future changes need to be done. If a client doesn’t like a certain filter or wants to adjust it, you can easily turn off the filter or modify it to your client’s preference. Another tool to speed up the process is the Quick Selection Tool. Now you can drag the Quick Selection Tool throughout the areas you are trying to capture. Doing this will accelerate the process that you can alter the capture even more by clicking on the “Refine Edge” button in the toolbar. There you can change your selection by modifying the capture radius, contrast, smooth, feather and contract/expand. You can also select to have the captured area as a simple selection, a quick mask, a selection over a black background or a white one or preview a mask selection. The new compositing functionality is pretty cool in that you can build a higher quality image from multiple sources. It works really well and I was able to put together a few images I had on my drive. I was surprised on how well Photoshop can align the images on the fly. It analyzed the images and matched up the lines and positions of objects so that there were no visible discrepancies. For those of you who are Adobe Lightroom users, your Photoshop edits will automatically update so that your Lightroom files are the latest and that you won’t have to worry about keeping track of the work you perform in Photoshop. Personally, the most impressive and useful features to me were the Smart Filters, photo compositing and the Quick Selection Tool. I do a lot of image editing and use a lot of filters for my projects. These new features and enhancements are going to help me tremendously in my work. I am very happy to see Adobe moving towards streamlining many repetitive processes and making the tools even easier to utilize them into your workflow. While Photoshop CS3 works extremely well for graphic, web and photographers, you should be aware that Adobe has also release Photoshop CS3 Extended. Photoshop CS3 Extended offers the same features as the regular CS3 version but it offers 3D and motion capabilities as well as more image analyzing features. Adobe Photoshop CS3 is quite an improvement over the previous edition. There are enough features and enhancements that make this product more than upgrade. The integration across all of the Creative Suite 3 products removes a lot of roadblocks that these products used to encounter. Adobe has put forth a tremendous effort towards integrating Macromedia’s products into the Adobe family without compromising their own applications. The new features and enhancements to Adobe Photoshop CS3 make this application a must buy. Adobe Photoshop CS3 earns 5 stars out of 5. You can click here to download a 30-day trial of Photoshop CS3. You can also click the following links to purchase Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Apple Macintosh or Microsoft Windows computer systems. Photoshop CS3 is compatible with the Windows Vista operating system and Intel Macintosh systems. About Adobe Photoshop CS3 Adobe Photoshop CS3 is the standard industry application for graphic designers and other media professionals. The program offers users a variety of options towards creating high quality design work for print, web and other platforms. You can learn more about Adobe Photoshop CS3 by visiting the official website at http://www.adobe.com/photoshop/.

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