Rangefinder Magazine
December 2004

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Adobe Photoshop CS Overview by Scott Kelby
Features That Will Change the Way You Work

This is one of a series of Adobe Photoshop tutorials sponsored by Adobe Systems and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) to be reprinted in Rangefinder magazine. The article first appeared Photoshop User magazine, the official publication of NAPP (www.photoshopuser.com).

File Browser on Steroids
One of the two most important features for photographers introduced back in Photoshop 7 was the File Browser. As soon as photographers began to use it, two things happened: They loved it; and they started saying stuff like “Man, this is great, but if you could only (fill in the blank), then it would be incredible.” Well, the good news is—in CS, it is incredible. In fact, it’s taken such a giant leap, there’s not nearly enough space here to cover all the features and enhancements, but we’ll start with these: Now you can click on any thumbnail and drag it where you want it. It’s like working in your own personal light box, and it makes sorting fun, visual and intuitive. In Photoshop CS it works the way you always thought it should, and it’s great! Also if you’re one of the people (like me) who thought the large size setting for viewing thumbnails wasn’t nearly large enough, you can now create your own custom thumbnail size to make them about as big as you want. Better yet, if you do like using small thumbnails, you’ll be happy to know that you can make the preview section huge just by dragging it to the height and width you want. You can also flag images, which is great when you’re trying to sort quickly through a folder full of images, and you can choose to display only flagged images, only unflagged images, or both. Use this once, and you’ll wonder how you got along without it. Another one of those “how-did-we-live-without-it” features is the ability to edit the metadata of multiple images at once and to add keywords to photos (either individually, or as a group) and then perform searches by file name, keywords or other metadata info. This searching capability is big—really big. As far as working within the File Browser, it has become dramatically easier, because the File Browser now has its own small menu bar built right in, with easy access to all of the commands, including direct access to automation tools for photographers such as Contact Sheet, Web Gallery, Picture Package, and some new ones (we’ll get to those in a minute). Other workflow improvements include the ability to reconfigure the individual sections within the File Browser (metadata, preview, etc.) to create your own workspace. You can also save folders as favorites and jump right where you want to go in one click (no more digging through the navigation panel). Again, you’ll uncover tweaks and enhancements in the File Browser (such as one-button launching from the Options Bar, building caches for subfolders, the ability to drag a folder from your desktop into the File Browser and instantly target that folder, and more), and it now feels like a mature tool, with enough bells and whistles to give even high-end pros a permanent grin.

Right at the top of many a designer’s wish list was type on a path from right within Photoshop. Now thankfully, they can scratch that one off the list.	The new Photomerge adds automation to the task of stitching together panoramic images by blending the edges and fixing common panoramic perspective problems.

16-bit Across the Board
Photoshop CS greatly expands the support for working with 16-bit RAW images from high-end digital cameras. First off, you can now open a RAW image from within the File Browser—just double-click on its thumbnail (as you would any photo), and the image opens immediately in the Camera RAW dialog. The RAW dialog has matured as well, and everything’s in one window, with a streamlined interface and even more features. Not only is acquiring RAW images made simple, but also things like Layers, Shapes and Type are all available in 16-bit mode.

Color Filters, Digital Style
Remember all those lens filters we used to buy to compensate for different lighting situations? Remember the 81A (B, C, D) warming and cooling filters, fluorescent filters, etc.? Well in Photoshop CS, you’ve got digital versions of those called Photo Filters, but Adobe took it a step further by making these Photo Filters Adjustment Layers, so you have complete control after you’ve applied them, not just before (as with regular filters). There are 18 Photo Filters in all, and you can control the Density of each filter and whether or not you want to preserve the photo’s luminosity as you apply the filter.

Panos Come to Photoshop
Okay, granted you could piece together panoramas in earlier versions of Photoshop, but it was totally a manual process. You not only had to shoot your panorama pretty flawlessly, you had to really know what you were doing to correct image perspective, blending, etc. Now, the process is easier and much of it is automated (in some cases, entirely), thanks to a new built-in pano stitcher called Photomerge. This isn’t just Photoshop Element’s pano-maker ported over to the mother ship, this goes far beyond that, supporting high-resolution images with advanced blending algorithms and the option to create the pano, but still keep all the layers intact.

Picture-Perfect Picture Package
One of the most popular automation plug-ins for photographers has matured, and is improved once again by giving you the ability to create your own custom layouts (rather than using the default set Adobe has provided). You can also now adjust such things as the space between images, and even create Picture Packages with overlapping images. This is a big step forward for Picture Package.

Okay, so the photographers are covered big time in this update, but what about graphic designers?

The new Photo Filter Adjustment Layer enables you to digitally recreate many of those screw-on lens filters we used to buy to correct for lighting problems.	The Filter Gallery puts all the Paint, Brush, Texture, Artistic, etc. filters in one interface where you can combine, mix, stack, and experiment with combinations of filters to create entirely new effects.

Type on a Path
At last! I can’t believe it. I’ve lived long enough to see Type on a Path actually come to Photoshop. And yes, it’s the real deal. (You can also fill shapes with type, as in Illustrator.) You create a path with the Pen tool (or a shape with the Shape tools), get the Type tool, click on the path and start-a typin’, and son-of-a-gun if that Type doesn’t follow along that Path. Perhaps best of all, Adobe didn’t introduce a new special Type tool to make this happen—you use the standard Type tool, but when you move the cursor near a path, you’ll see the cursor change, indicating that it’s dying for you to click and let it jump onto that path. Once on the path, you can do all the things you hoped you’d be able to: move its position, flip it from one side of the path to the other, edit the type, or change the leading, tracking, etc.

Layer Comps
Creative pros will love this new feature, which lets you view multiple layouts within your same document, with just one click. Here’s an example: You’re working on an ad, and you come up with a layout you like. You save that as a Layer Comp in the Layer Comps palette. (This saves the layer stacking order, layer opacity, blending modes, position, layers styles applied, etc.). Now, you can experiment with other layouts, and when you find one you like, save it as a layer comp, too. Then, when it’s time to show the client, you can just click through the comps and see each layout instantly. Oh, but it’s better than that—it returns your document to the state it was in when you saved the layer comp (complete with all your layers settings intact). When the client makes his or her decision, you can pick up working right there—you don’t have to recreate anything. It’s another one of those “try-it-once-use-it-forever” features.

Filter Gallery
Another addition that designers, photographers, Web designers (okay, everybody) will love is the Filter Gallery. It gathers all the Artistic, Brush Stroke, Sketch and Texture filters into one large dialog that enables you to experiment with different combinations of filters (like stacking, tweaking and multiplying), which really extends the creative uses for these filters in ways we haven’t been able to before. There’s a large preview window so you can see your creation in progress, and it’s amazing how hooked you can get on working in the Filter Gallery.

You can now create your own new document sizes as presets from within the New Document dialog. Plus, there are new presets for video, complete with guides designating NTSC Action Safe and Title Safe areas.	Photoshop CS adds Shadow/Highlight, a powerful new tool for tonal adjustments.

Image Editing
If you do color correction of any kind, grab a pen because you’re about to mark a huge item off your wish list. Now there’s a floating Histogram palette, complete with views of individual channels (and yes, you can view each channel in color), so now you can have in-depth Histogram info when correcting with Curves, Color Balance, and even Brightness/Contrast (not that you ever use Brightness/Contrast). Not only that, the before and after Histograms are displayed simultaneously as you’re making an adjustment. Also in the image-editing space, there’s a new Replace Color brush that’s pretty ingenious. It works like a Clone Stamp tool for color. You sample a color from one area and it replaces the color where you paint with the color that you sampled from. It’s great for removing red-eye. Another handy new feature is called “Match Color,” which enables you to precisely match a tone from one photo with the tones in another color. Want the flesh tone of a person in one photo to match the flesh tone of a person in another? This is what Match Color is all about.

Besides the Histogram, the other most significant image-correction tool is called Shadows/Highlights. I predict this will become a huge hit with both photographers (for adjusting overall lighting) and the prepress crowd (for easily making subtle adjustments) because it may be the most user-friendly pro-level correction tool yet. Don’t let the simplicity of the initial dialog fool you—just click the “Show more options” button, and you’ll realize that this thing is for real.

caption 1	Now you can assign your own custom keyboard shortcuts to just about any command, palette or tool.	Layer Comps let you quickly compare different layouts of the same document.

Fully Assignable Shortcuts
This one feature, while certainly not as flashy or as exciting as many of the others, is absolutely worth the upgrade price all by itself because it will pay for itself in about two weeks. That’s right, you can now assign keyboard shortcuts to just about any tool, command, or function! Just imagine it—a keyboard shortcut for Gaussian Blur, Unsharp Mask, Image Size or Canvas Size! No more digging under menus ever again. This, my friends, is a beautiful thing (and setting up my own favorite shortcuts is the very first thing I did after installing Photoshop CS).

Photoshop for Video
This is the version of Photoshop that video editors have been waiting for, because (among other things) it adds the #1 item on the video gang’s wish list: non-square pixels. Gone are the days of stretching, or guessing what it’s going to look like on video. Plus, there are new document presets complete with NTSC Action Safe and Title Safe guides already in place.

Web Extreme
Although Photoshop CS has bucket-loads of new features (including a greatly enhanced Web Gallery), ImageReady (its bundled companion for creating Web graphics) may have gotten nearly as many new features on its own. ImageReady CS includes a new streamlined object-based interface, and a lot of “wish-list” features such as the ability to export to Flash feature, enhanced tables, rollovers, slice sets, and the ability to export layers and frames as files.
In closing, kudos to Adobe for once again moving Photoshop forward by fulfilling the wishes of so many users, while still coming up with new, inventive, creative features that make CS the best Photoshop there’s ever been.

Scott Kelby is the president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) and a best-selling author.

Caption 1

1. Finally Photoshop has in-depth Histograms with before and after readouts and individual Color Channels that you can use with Curves, Color Balance, Hue/Saturation, or most any tonal enhancement tool.