Review: Photoshop CS3

• Article 41 of 89
• MacFormat, May 2007

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Photoshop CS3 is finally upon us – at least the final beta before it’s eventual release, with only a few bug fixes left to go. So, after our initial look at the new features we can expect in CS3, back in issue ???, we can now give you an idea of how the software is going to work out in practice.

To recap, we thought CS3 was going to be a great buy if you have an Intel Mac, simply because of the speed improvements gained from making Photoshop a Universal Binary, rather than an emulated Rosetta application. But even for those of us with PowerPC Macs or who aren’t so concerned by speed, there’s a good range of powerful new features: an improved interface that not only looks better, but gives you quicker access to features and uses less screen space; a Smart Filters option that lets you apply filters to objects without making the effects permanent; a quick selection tool that lets you quickly brush over objects of your image to let Photoshop know you want to select that entire object; and a Sources palette that lets you set offsets for the source in Clone Stamp procedures, as well as save up to four sources for the Clone Stamp tool, so that you can switch between them when you need them.

On top of that, minor improvements to RAW file handling and the vanishing point tool, new controls for changing to a black-and-white colourspace, automatic layer alignment and blending, and a “Refine edge” tool for modifying selections all make Photoshop CS3 if not totally irresistible at least worth taking a second glance at.

A change of pace
The final version of Photoshop doesn’t add anything to this feature list, but does modify things under the hood, not always for the better. We re-ran the Retouch Artists’ Photoshop Speed Test (http://retouchartists.com/pages/speedtest.html), a pleasing combination of Gaussian blurs, image resizing and other performance-taxing Photoshop functions, to see whether Adobe had spruced up the performance any. The initial run on our test machine, an iMac Core Duo with 1.5GB of RAM with a roomy 250GB scratch disk, did manage to slice three seconds off the test, reducing the time from 3 minutes dead to 2 minutes 57 seconds. Yet a repeat of the test directly afterwards was an astonishingly bad 6 minutes 56 seconds – slower than CS2 running the test under Rosetta - compared with 1 minutes 50 seconds in our original review, something that continued with repeated tests.

Further tests also showed a similar slowdown. Running the test in CS3 in Rosetta – something anyone who has a range of plug-ins that haven’t yet been adapted into Universal Binaries is going to have to do on occasion – took 9 minutes 25s, compared with 7 minutes 40 seconds in the original review. And running CS3 on an 867MHz PowerBook G4 with 768MB of RAM took 31 minutes 19 seconds, compared with 29 minutes 45s in the original review and 30 minutes in CS2.

Why the slowdown? We could have been very lucky in the original review, some OS X security update could have slowed down the whole system, or Adobe could have messed up Photoshop’s caching system in the interim time. Since it was the final Gaussian blur that choked the system in all our tests, it’s also very possible that some algorithm-tinkering has gone awry in that particular plug-in and the rest of Photoshop is just fine. We’re sincerely hoping that these particular bugs will be fixed by the final release.

The supporting act
As well as a whole raft of new features, there’s a range of programs that come with Photoshop, both in its standalone version and as part of the various versions of Creative Suite 3 that Adobe will be including it in. There’s a new version of Bridge, Adobe’s front-end to all its CS3 applications and your files; Adobe Help Viewer gets a slight upgrade to 1.1; Adobe Stock Photos, a great way to give Adobe more money… sorry, to view and purchase stock images online, also gets an upgrade, even though it’s little more than an alias to a Bridge feature; and there’s a whole new program, Device Central CS3, to get your teeth into.

Bridge’s enhancements are quite large. As well as getting a shiny new look similar to Photoshop’s and an upgrade to Universal Binary status, it folds in the “Start Meeting” feature that Adobe has been trying to tout in all its products since it acquired Macromedia’s Breeze. Whether you feel like paying Adobe every time you want to hold a web meeting is up to you, but Adobe does at least make it pretty simple, even if it currently only makes the service available to people in the US. There’s also a new Stacks feature for grouping photos, and the ability to import data into Bridge from digital cameras.

Despite the small version number increase, Help Viewer has also had a make-over and, it seems, a rethink by Adobe about how best to lay out its documentation. Help in CS2 seemed a little more product-focused and a lot less task-focused than in CS3 and we think the changes are for the better: it’s far easier to find out how to do something now you don’t have to know what the exact feature you’re for is called – although there’s always the search function and index to fall back on, of course.

Device Central CS3 is a new part of the CS3 range, giving you a way to trial your content on mobile phones. Reminiscent of the device viewer in the now-defunct Adobe GoLive CS2, it has profiles for various mobile phones listing their capabilities and shows you what your content would look like on each phone’s screen. Although it supports content from both Photoshop and Illustrator, its real focus is still-to-come Flash CS3 and phones that have Flash Lite installed, making it of limited use to most users.

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