Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

Well, vacation's past and it's time for a new year and new blogs. Since the hosting industry doesn't exactly rumble much over the holidays, I'll need to look elsewhere for content on this, our inaugural episode for 2007. Adobe has politely furnished a new toy to play with, for free... for now. It's the best toy of all, though- the Photoshop CS3 beta. Yes, on Earth-2, known as Photoshop 10. I'll point out that on Earth-2, all software products are numbered sequentially from their original release, as, being a more pure and wholesome world, there are no marketing departments.

Standard software review disclaimers apply here. My testing methodology was fairly lax, mostly just toyed with the new features. I'm not sure yet whether I want to chance relying on it for any work product. As Adobe would like you to recall, it's a beta, and everything is subject to change.

The Big Features

Smart Filters
The banner headline here is one I "predicted" in a blog a while back. Not like I had to be Kreskin to figure it out, though. Smart Filters are here in all their non-destructive goodness. Yes, plastic wrap, Gaussian blur, and note paper to your heart's content without concern for its ultimate reversibility.

The Smart Filters build on the Smart Object concept added in the current CS2 version. A Smart Object was the contents of a layer that were "saved" when the layer was initially converted. The contents of a Smart Object could then be scaled, transformed, or warped while still preserving the original pixel data. In a vague, nutshellish sense, it brought some aspects of vector editing to raster editing. Only some aspects, of course, as the contents still interpolate if you upsize them.

Smart Filters are applied to Smart Objects. Thus you have to transform the layer first into the aforementioned Smart Object. Photoshop will either convert a layer to a Smart Object automatically if you choose to add a Smart Filter, or any filter application to an existing Smart Object will automatically become a Smart Filter. In practice, the Smart Filters appear much like layer blending modes under the layer in the Layers Palette.

Basically, the system works. The Smart Object is still available to edit, thus you retain the ability to open them and make more fundamental, "destructive" changes to the contents. The Smart Filter will update automatically to reflect the change, just like a Layer Style. You can even change blending modes and opacity on the Smart Filter, and mask their effects. All in all, a pretty powerful new feature.

I'm not sure how much further Photoshop can go in the pursuit of non-destructive editing. With the inclusion of Smart Filters, nearly every change can be made while preserving the underlying pixel data. I think they'll actually have to break down that last quantum barrier and introduce the ability to edit the photo before it's actually taken.

Quick Selection Tool / Refine Edge
The Quick Selection Tool is another new addition to the main toolbox, setting up shop with the "beloved" Magic Wand Tool. To anyone frustrated with the results the Wand had provided lo these many years, you are not in for any relief. Selections & masking are the subject of reams and reams of tutorials, tips, and overpriced Photoshop books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. The very idea of a "quick" selection is, some might argue, a contradiction. Quick to some means dirty, and many times it is. Many times dirty is good enough, and dirty is what you can find with this new tool.

Like most of the things driven by machines that attempt to capture human intention, this one is not very good at it. I softballed it at first, trying things with good background contrast and areas of similar tone. As expected, it performed decently. Though even on what I considered reasonably "simple" attempts, it would still stray off, capturing areas abutting what I intended to select.

The new tool, as well as all other selection tools, now includes the "Refine Edge" dialog. Refine Edge provides sliders for softening the selection, expanding and contracting, sharpening and blurring. Playing with these didn't solve the overeager "Quick" selection system. For giggles, I attempted a hair selection, and that went about as well as I imagined it would. Though the refining dialog was able to pick up some more subtle variations, it did so at the expense of adding transparency to areas that should have been quite solid. It did end up with a nicely haloed face selection using it.

The Refine Edge dialog is a useful enhancement that provides access to a common set of mask modifiers that required multiple steps to get at in the past. It will probably end up being the more memorable of the attempts to better the masking process in Photoshop, whereas, barring significant improvement, the Quick Selection Tool may take its place in infamy with its neighbor, the Magic Wand.

Little Stuff

There is some expanded functionality to the Vanishing Point system. Though fun to try out, I have yet to encounter a use for it, so I didn't really give it a serious workout. Since my work is rarely of an architectural nature, I'm not really going to be using this.

The Black & White conversion adjustment is another interesting case where, as with the Refine Edge dialog, the developers have amalgamated a set of tools into a single place. Much like masking techniques, everybody and his brother's cat has a way to create a grayscale image from a color one. This incorporates a channel mixer style with presets for those more into picking channels straight up or picking bits and pieces of each.

The Curves dialog has been improved with some useful bits, which is nice. There have been some general interface refinements as well in terms of how pallets are handled. Docking sidebar-like master pallets have been added that create a kind of "icon based" flyout. Closed, they're a series of icons, which, when you click on them, causes the palette contents to fly out.

It's difficult to explain well in print, but I certainly found it annoying as I was trying to figure out how to get them undocked and off onto my second monitor. The bottom line is I wasn't able to undock them. You can pull the individual pallets out of the sidebar pallets and drag them over. For single monitor users, it's a good feature. For folks like me (whom there are, admittedly, less of) it's a bit of an annoyance. Still, I was able to get my preferred palette layout eventually.

Conclusions

The Smart Filters are certainly the showcase feature at this point. They provide not only the root function of non-destructive editing, but other benefits. Those who were prone to duplicating layers, either for back up, or for layer blending effects, will simply be able to add and move around Smart Filters to a single layer. That means smaller file sizes. The Quick Select tool needs some work before it will ever take the world by storm, but the Filter Refine edge dialog is a useful addition for any selection.

Overall I think it's a good direction for Photoshop and am looking forward to the final product at this point.