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Rangefinder
Magazine Field Test: by Ctein
I tested Photoshop under Windows 2000 (SP4). I could not activate the program over a dial-up modem—I had to call up on a voice line and do it myself. In Photoshop CS you can designate a secondary plug-in folder. This preference seemed like a great way to access the third-party filters installed in my older version of Photoshop. That generated cryptic warning messages on launch about “MMXCore” functions not working with this version of Photoshop. CS was trying to load old versions of code that wouldn’t work with CS. Adobe recommends putting filters in a folder just for CS instead of trying to access Photoshop plug-in folders from previous generations. The Photoshop documentation, in the form of over 1000 installed HTML pages and a PDF file on the Resources CD, is packed full of well written text and illustrations. I compliment Adobe on the quality of the content. But… The printed documentation for all of Premium Creative Suite is a small 90-page booklet that introduces you to the overall workflow of the different components. There are no paper manuals for any of the applications. For a product that sells for $750 to $1200, Adobe could provide manuals. There is something to be said about having a hard-copy manual. Online documentation allows quick and easy searches and hyperlinks, but it’s a bit hard on the eyes and not convenient for studying a subject in depth—especially when using a graphics-oriented program at the same time, so the “book” is competing for screen space. I’m used to programs that get more bloated and slower with each successive generation (and Photoshop has not been entirely immune), but Photoshop CS launched about 20 percent faster than Photoshop 5.5 and trimmed 20 to 45 percent off of the Photoshop 5.5 operation times. Layers are now fully functional in 16-bit mode, as are the file adjustment functions, the new photo filter, shadow/ highlight adjustments, sharpen, noise filters, some blur filters and others. CS is not actually 16-bit native; most of the art-oriented filters will not run on 16-bit files, for example. Adobe has expanded the ways one can organize layers. Layers are really filtering operations that get applied to the output of the layer beneath and passed on to the one above. This set-up makes the organization of layers in Photoshop as critical as it is in a program like Illustrator. For example, a curves adjustment layer above a color correction adjustment layer does not produce the same image as color correction above curves. CS adds hierarchical directories and sub-directories of layers and layer comps—alternative sets of image modifications contained within a single directory that you can switch between to change the version of an image you’re working with. While layer comps are promoted as a design production tool, I have found that they can be a lot more useful than that. For example, I’m accustomed to adding curves and hue/saturation layers to my image files so I can precisely tune them for a specific printer. Layers let me save and load settings for different printers without clobbering or permanently changing the underlying image. But I still have to keep track of those settings files. With layer comps, I can incorporate these alternatives into the PSD file. Effective 16-bit image control and more layers mean really big files. Unless you seriously cripple histories, you typically need RAM equal to about 10 times the file size if you want to avoid swapping to disk. Unfortunately, for the time being Photoshop CS can’t access more than 2GB of RAM—no matter how much memory you have in your system. This is going to be a big problem for power users. Adobe hasn’t made any announcements about when Photoshop will support more RAM. Until then, the best thing you can do is to invest in the fastest, widest-bandwidth RAID 5 disk array you can afford. Unless you can pump data in and out of the scratch space at blinding speed, your workflow is going to slow to a crawl with big files. Live, three-color histograms are finally in Photoshop, and I’m thrilled. We still need histograms superimposed on the curves tool graphs, but this is a big step in the right direction and really speeds up my work. The synchronized hand tool, which lets me scroll A/B comparison images in different windows together, has also sped up my work process. The synchronized hand tool helps because it means no more switching back and forth between windows when I want to compare different parts of enlarged photographs. I went in with a very ho-hum attitude about the File Browser—I thought it was just going to be another preview tool. Boy, was I wrong about that. It’s neat. I especially like the automated and batch features—like group renaming of files (with very flexible control parameters) and contact sheets built from selected images. Personally, I have little use for automated web page construction, but the ability to sort the files in the browser by criteria like image dimensions is going to come in very handy when I’m trying to size images to fit. On the other hand, the Filter Gallery was of no use to me. It didn’t include any of the filters I most normally use like blur, sharpen, noise and simple distort functions. The Filter Gallery has its place—it is probably useful for the artsy folks, but not the “realistic” photographers. I have a feeling that the improved script support in CS will turn out to be the single most important enhancement of all. The potential exists for some really interesting third-party tools and controls. The handful of build-in scripts, like “Crop and Straighten” indicate what’s possible. If the same kind of developer culture appears as it did for plug-ins and for actions we could be in for some really good times. Two new photography tools, the Lens Blur filter and the Photo Filter action, surprised me. Experience has made me skeptical of programmers’ efforts to simulate real-world photographic effects with any degree of realism. Surprisingly though, these new tools are good enough to fool many observers. When I varied the Lens Blur iris parameters and actually saw the “boke” change in the out-of-focus areas, I was impressed. The Photo Filters don’t merely apply a color tint to the image, they alter the hue and luminance values of the different colors. In other words, these tools make changes in a manner that is much closer to what happens when a camera filter cuts out some wavelengths of incoming light. For example, a red filter not only shifts color but lightens reds and darkens greens, and these new filters more accurately imitate this process. Another useful tool, the Color Replacement tool (Figure 1) has potential well beyond what Adobe had probably envisioned for it. Because it has hue, saturation, color and luminosity modes, you can use it to do a lot more than merely replace colors. You can use it to selectively alter the characteristics of a range of colors based upon the target color. It’s like a brush tool with automatic color masking.
I think Adobe didn’t recognize how useful this tool could be because it lacks a critical control: strength. It always operates at 100 percent opacity. One can use layers, fades and history brushes to work around that limitation, but that’s a kludge. If Adobe adds an opacity control, this tool will become immensely valuable for doing complex and subtle image adjustments. My favorite new trick? The shadow/highlight adjustment works miracles on scans of slides and digital photographs, enhancing and bringing out highlight and shadow tones without destroying fine detail or midtone quality. (See the images on this page for an example of this adjustment.)
I’ve loved Applied Science Fiction’s Digital SHO plug-in, but Photoshop’s shadow/highlight tool is faster, has a better interface and preview function with much more complete and flexible controls over how the tonal characteristics of the image will be altered. And most of the time Photoshop’s tool yields better-looking results. I’m really, really impressed with this tool. Just go ahead and try it on any photograph that has important highlight and shadow detail, even if you think the photograph looks fine already. You may be impressed: often, it will make a photograph look even better. I’ve been a professional photographer for three decades and been involved with digital/electronic photography and printing even longer than that. Up until now I’ve treated Photoshop as an immensely flexible and powerful computerized version of a traditional darkroom. Photoshop CS is pushing me over some kind of threshold; so many of the tools that I consider most useful and important don’t have even remote analogs in traditional work. And at the very least these tools can save time over their darkroom counterparts. The last time a tool seriously changed my outlook was when I took up dye transfer printing back in the 1970s. Photoshop CS is starting to get me to conceptualize my work differently again. Ctein is one of the few remaining dye transfer printers on the planet and the author of Post Exposure: Advanced Techniques for the Photographic Printer. Readers may see more of his work and read a sample chapter of his book at his web site: www.plaidworks.com/ctein/.
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Adobe is trying very hard to change the way we think about computer-based photography. It’s not just about simple photographs any more. Photoshop CS reflects this change in new features like layer comps, shadow/highlight adjustments and photo filter adjustments; in tools like ImageReady; and in the almost full integration (finally!) of layers into the Photoshop workflow.
