Review: Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta
- Article 32 of 89
- MacFormat, February 2007
Better, stronger, faster, prettier: the Universal Photoshop CS3 has been worth waiting for
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There’s only one Photoshop. Others have tried but failed to topple it from the throne of best graphics editing application, but Photoshop remains the king. So it’s not surprising that the next version, Photoshop CS3, has been hotly anticipated. The main reason is that Photoshop CS3 will be the first Universal version of the application: no more emulation under Rosetta for MacIntel owners. Finally, the full power of Intel’s chips can be experienced.
Even though CS3 isn’t due out for a few months, Adobe has wisely chosen to release a beta of Photoshop to whet everyone’s appetite – and maybe to see if they need to add any more features to get us to hand over the upgrade fee.
The need for speed
The first thing anyone with a MacIntel will want to know is whether CS3 is faster – it might be the only thing they want to know, because of Photoshop’s underwhelming performance in Rosetta. Good news: it really is quite impressive in the speed stakes. We used the Retouch Artists’ Photoshop Speed Test (http://retouchartists.com/pages/speedtest.html) as a benchmark, since it employs colour-space changes, Gaussian blurs, image resizing and other performance-taxing Photoshop functions. Photoshop CS2 running under Rosetta on an iMac Dual Core with 1.5GB of RAM took a plodding 5 minutes and 45 seconds to complete the test. CS3 took just 3 minutes to perform the task the first time and just 1 minute 50 the second time, thanks to Photoshop’s various caching features. It also feels faster and snappier in everyday use. If all you’re looking for are speed improvements on a MacIntel, CS3 is going to give you what you want.
However, we also tried CS3 in Rosetta. Why did we bother? Because Photoshop CS3 won’t run your existing filters and plug-ins unless they’ve been updated to Universal binaries – or you run CS3 in Rosetta. In this test, CS3 gave us a decidedly unimpressive benchmark of 7 minutes 40. If you ever need to run a filter that won’t work natively on a Mactel, you might as well use it in CS2 instead, assuming that Adobe don’t put in some performance improvements by the time of CS3’s eventual release (It’s a “known issue” that AltiVec and PPCCore plug-ins don’t load on Intel Macs, so that’s not wholly unlikely).
Since not everyone’s made the move to Intel yet, we also gave CS3 a try out on something a little less fleet of foot: an 867MHz PowerBook G4 with 768MB of RAM. The PowerBook took a yawn-inducing 30 minutes to run through the test with CS2, but only 29 minutes and 45 seconds with CS3, a clear saving of… 15 seconds. If you’re on a PowerPC machine still, don’t look for performance improvements from CS3.
You’ve got the look
Maybe you’re looking for a bit more than a speed boost from CS3. What can you expect? The most obvious change is the interface, which has had another minor overhaul. Cosmetically, everything’s a bit more like Apple’s Pro apps, with blacker edges, but the main changes to the interface are space-saving.
The Tools palette has become a single column, although you do have the option of switching it back to dual column if you want. Adobe’s also taken inspiration from GoLive’s interface – or at least GoLive when it was GoLive CyberStudio rather than Adobe GoLive – by allowing you to convert palettes to single small icons that dock to the side of the screen. You can do this manually or set the palettes to auto-collapse. It’s a handy trick that makes you wonder why Adobe ever ditched it in the first place.
Probably the most useful new CS3 feature is the Smart Filters option. Although non-destructive filters have been around for some time, Adobe’s finally made it possible for you to apply any filter to any layers you’ve converted to Smart Objects and then to undo it at a later stage, leaving other changes you’ve made intact. You can even just click on the standard “eye” icon next to the filter in the Layers palette to hide its effects or use a slider to change the filter’s parameters. There are certain other functions that don’t work unless you “rasterize” your Smart Object – that is, make your filters permanent – but for most operations it’s a decidedly welcome addition.
Not so fast
A Quick Selection Tool should be equally welcome but isn’t quite so inviting in practice. It works just like the Brush tool, but it’s designed to select objects: just brush over an object and Photoshop will analyse the image to work out where the object’s edges are and create an appropriate selection. Basically, it’s the Magic Wand tool again, but less prone to leaving out the middles of objects. Unfortunately, it seems very eager to add in other objects as well, meaning that if you already use the Magic Wand, the pen tool or Fluid Mask to select objects for cut-outs, you’ll probably still end up using them most of the time. With a little practice, it can be helpful, though.
Other enhancements are more mundane and will probably find their uses in due course. Automatic layer alignment and blending lets you combine the best parts of multiple images of the same scene into one “best” image. “Refine Edge” smoothes, feathers, contracts or expands the current selection using slider controls. The Vanishing Point tool no longer restricts you to perpendicular planes, while black and white conversion is now far less of a guessing game than it used to be, with sliders for controlling tonal conversions. Finally, Adobe Camera Raw has been enhanced will some new controls, a parametric tone curve, and other features.
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