"Photoshop Goes Vector" |
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Adobe's Photoshop 6.0 is not just any upgrade. It is a major upgrade with enhancements, improvements, new tools and new features, and an improved, intuitive, and more streamlined interface. There is something in the new version for every user: individuals who are just entering the field of image-editing; professionals who needs high-end output; desktop publishers and graphic designers who need efficient text handling and creative typographic features; Web designers who need to create banners and buttons, optimize images for the highest quality at the smallest download size, and create dynamic Web graphics such as GIF animations and JavaScript rollovers; and printing/pre-press professionals who need to prepare images for printing and create color separations. New features include: vector shape drawing with resolution-independent output; tighter integration with ImageReady 3.0; on-canvas text entry and advanced formatting; layer styles and new effects; image warping and distortion; interface enhancements including a new context-sensitive tool options bar and preset manager; extensive PDF workflow including shared PDF annotations; consistent color management with Adobe Illustrator; and streamlined Web workflow with Adobe GoLive. The image on the left shows an example of combining editable vector text and images. Available for both PC and Macintosh. Price: $609 for all platforms. Registered users of earlier versions of Adobe Photoshop can upgrade to version 6.0 for $199. This upgrade pricing, though, does not apply to Limited Edition versions. The Adobe Web site has a wealth of information on related software. Great place for beginner users to peruse for general information, step-by-step instructions on many features, upgrades, free downloadable demos, Adobe Magazine subscription, and other downloadable files. There is also an extensive selection of cool tips and tricks, available from the site as well. Web site: http://www.adobe.com |
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Advanced Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced computer users. Photoshop is a powerful program with numerous features. If you are serious about image-editing and need this level of robustness in a program, there are enough books, online tutorials and tips, learning videos, and classes to aid advanced beginning and intermediate level computer users. The image to the right shows how a beginner could impress her/his friends by taking an ordinary graphic of a zebra and easily enhance it by using the neon nights action. It is also the perfect tool for professionals who need advanced features. Beginners might want to start with Photoshop LE (Photoshop Limited Edition) which provides the features hobbyists and small businesses need, but lacks the high level production elements graphics professionals use. | |||
What's New in Photoshop 6.0
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Vector Shape Support: With Photoshop 6.0 you now have tools for creating and outputting crisp, editable vector shapes and text. Using these tools, you can incorporate resolution-independent, vector-based graphics and type along with pixel-based images to achieve a range of design effects. This vector data can be saved in EPS, DCS, TIFF, and PDF formats. The new shape tools: rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, polygon, custom shape, and line, let you create shapes in three forms: as work paths, as shape layers, or as painted pixels. When you select a shape tool, a context-sensitive tool options bar appears at the top of the workspace, so you can select options. For example, for a rectangle, you can set whether it's unconstrained, square, fixed size, proportional, or drawn from the center (see image to the right for view of rectangle options). Plus, you can select a layer style, blending mode, and opacity setting for a shape layer before you start drawing. Photoshop 6.0 also provides pathfinder operations for quickly combining basic shapes into hard-to-draw shapes. These operations include: add, subtract, intersect, and exclude (see image to right for examples). At any time, you can edit the segments of any basic or combined shape by using the direct selection, add anchor point, delete anchor point, and convert anchor point tools. The image to the left shows two graphics: (1) a rectangle cut out by an ellipse shape using the subtract operation. As you can see, the anchor points are still present so you can edit any part of the two shapes; and (2) the final custom shape. The custom shapes you create can be saved in a shape library and used over and over. And, since these libraries are portable, they can be shared among workgroups. Photoshop 6.0 also ships with a selection of custom shape libraries. You can quickly create shapes for buttons using vector drawing tools and layer styles. I created the buttons in the image to the left with the rounded rectangular vector shape tool and then applied a layer style for the drop shadow. The new vector drawing tools make it easy to clip out image areas using crisp-edged, editable shapes. You can modify these layer clipping paths and even combine layer paths and layer masks in the same image. For the graphic to the right, I used a clipping path to delete the upper part of the picture and then used a layer mask and a gradient so the image would fade out at the bottom but retain crisp edges otherwise. Vector Text Support:Vector support in Photoshop 6.0 is not just limited to shapes. You can combine vector text with pixel-based images for stunning results. Plus, there is now direct text-editing in an image. You can enter text and modify style directly in the image, without having to toggle back and forth from a dialog box. If you rotate, scale, or skew your text in the image, the text remains editable. Further, new type-warping features let you distort type layers in the form of special shapes such as arcs and waves (see image to right for view of special shapes). Extensive new options for styling words and paragraphs now appear in Character and Paragraph palettes, which operates similarly to the palettes in Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. Here is an overview of the new character and paragraph options: (1) Character--you can apply color on a per-character basis, scale characters vertically and horizontally, set baseline shift, and prevent a range of characters from breaking across a line, as well as specifying kerning, leading, and tracking settings. Also Photoshop fully supports OpenType fonts and their related features, such as all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, ligatures, and oldstyle figures. For non-OpenType fonts, Photoshop produces faux versions of all of these features except for ligatures and oldstyle; and (2) Paragraph--you can specify alignment, space before and after, hanging punctuation, and left-, right-, and first-line indents on a per-paragraph basis, plus justification controls let you set minimum, maximum, and desired values for word spacing, letter spacing, and glyph scaling, as well as autoleading. The image to the left shows point text, first paragraph indenting, vertical text, small caps, special tracking, and color applied per-character. Content Layers: Photoshop 6.0 now has two kinds of content layers: (1) adjustment layers, which have long been an efficient way to apply editable color and tonal adjustments to multiple layers, and (2) fill layers, which make it equally as quick to apply editable gradients, patterns, and solid colors to layers. These content layers are extremely flexible and allow you to switch one type for another without having to delete the original layer or layer mask and create a new one. For example, in the image to the left I created a group of web buttons and then easily changed them using a fill layer. The left column is the original set with a gradient, and the right column is the second set with a pattern that was made with just a few clicks of the mouse. Very easy and fun and a useful feature for those designers who are indecisive and want to quickly view different fills before they commit. Layer Styles: Layer effects were first introduced in Photoshop 5.0 and offered you a fast way to apply drop shadows, glows, bevels, embossing, and other effects to layers. And once applied, these effects updated automatically when you changed the content of the layer. Now, Photoshop 6.0 provides you with an intuitive new layer effects interface, a new selection of effect options, and new support for saving your layer effect designs as layer styles. The new and enhanced features for layer effects include: the new stroke, overlay, and satin layer effects; a new contour option; advanced blending and transparency options; and enhancements to the drop shadow, inner shadow, glow, and bevel and emboss effects. The new Layer Styles dialog box shows at a glance which effects are applied to the currently selected layer (see image to the left for view of dialog box and image to the right for view of styles in the Layers palette). To add effects, you simply check each one you want in the list and specify appropriate settings. Once you have designed a custom layer style, you can then save it in the Styles palette for future use. Layer styles work just like layer effects and update automatically when you change layer contents. Styles can be applied to a variety of objects: shapes, text, brush strokes, etc. The graphic on the right shows buttons and text created using layer styles. Liquify Command: The new Liquify command lets you quickly distort or warp an image by interactively pushing, pulling, rotating, enlarging, and shrinking different image areas. These distortion controls are great for fine warping adjustments to small image areas as well as for sweeping adjustments that wildly distort an image. You can display a fine mesh over the image to help you achieve precise adjustments. Also, to prevent unwanted changes, you can freeze certain parts of the image and zero in on the areas you want to modify. To create the image to the left, I used an EPS graphic, applied warping adjustments, and then applied layer effects of outer glow, shadow, and color overlay. Slice Tools: With the new slice tool and slice select tool, you can define and edit slices directly in Photoshop 6.0. Before this version, slicing tools were only available in ImageReady. User-defined slices are defined by dragging over different image areas with the slice tool; Photoshop defines slices automatically for the areas you don't define. Also, you can modify many attributes of user-slices, including size, position, stacking order, and visibility. The benefit of sliced images is that you have more control over how optimization options are applied because you can select separate slices and then apply appropriate settings. For instance, an image that includes solid colors, text, and photographic images looks best with different settings applied to different areas. You can also assign a separate file name, URL link, Alt tag, and message to each slice. Once you've sliced an image, it can be moved into ImageReady so you can create rollovers or set up animations. Or, you can generate HTML pages directly from Photoshop, including the HTML table code necessary to reassemble the sliced image. The image on the right shows a graphic with slices, and the image on the left shows the Save for Web dialog box where you can align different optimization options to individual slices. Saved Slice Sets: ImageReady provides all of the slicing controls that are available in Photoshop, plus there are advanced controls for dividing, merging, duplicating, aligning, and linking slices. With ImageReady 3.0, you can also save multiple slices in named sets, so you can quickly select, optimize, output, and even delete only those slices. Slice sets give you a more efficient way to work with slices. For example, you could optimize and output only the image slices that contain interactive Web buttons for use in your Web pages. Dynamic Layer-Based Slices: Photoshop 6.0 also provides a new way to slice images by setting up effects on selected layers and then letting Photoshop or ImageReady generate layer-based slices for you. When you slice images in this manner, each slice is bound to the outermost pixels on each layer, so if you reposition or edit the content of the layer, the slice adjusts dynamically to accommodate these changes. This technique is very usefully for generating precise slices for JavaScript rollovers. The image on the right shows a set of Web buttons created as layer-based slices, and then the changes in the slices when I changed the styles. Tighter Integration with Adobe ImageReady 3.0: With Photoshop 6.0, you have a tighter integration with ImageReady 3.0. You can quickly jump back and forth between Photoshop and ImageReady because file-saving happens automatically in the background. Like Photoshop 6.0, ImageReady 3.0 has been designed to be more intuitive. For instance, when you select one of the new vector shape tools in the ImageReady toolbox, all of the options that affect that tool's behavior appear in one accessible content-sensitive tool options bar. ImageReady 3.0 also includes the new layer management controls, liquify command, and character and paragraph options offered in Photoshop 6.0. Thus, you can lock layers to prevent accidental editing; have alignment, leading, hyphenation, justification, and indent settings applied to any paragraph; specify space before and after paragraphs; and produce typographically correct hanging punctuation. It also includes the new every-line composer for automatically setting optimal line breaks in a paragraph, and character-level controls let you apply color to each character, specify that a range of characters stay together. Text can even be warped in ImageReady 3.0 as freely as in Photoshop 6.0. Most importantly, ImageReady 3.0 offers new creative options for animations and rollovers. Now you can animate warped text in ImageReady and even use a warped-text animation as a rollover. Plus, you can animate layer effects such as satins and gradients. The image to the left is the Slice palette. Rollover Styles: With ImageReady, you can design rollover effects without having to know how to write JavaScript code. It supports two types of rollover interactivity. You can design rollovers in which an image changes in a specific area when a particular mouse action occurs there, or secondary rollovers where a mouse action in one area causes something to happen in another area. You can have a rollover display simple effects, such as making a button glow; cause one image to swap out with another; and play back animations. You have the option of using standard mouse actions, such as mouse-down, mouse-click, and mouse-over, to trigger a rollover, or define custom actions to suit your Web design. With ImageReady 3.0, you have even more comprehensive rollover support: rollover states can now share color palettes to avoid distracting color shifts. Dynamic layer-based slicing and expanded image map controls enhance rollover creation. Also, you can preview rollovers directly in ImageReady without having to launch a browser. But most importantly, ImageReady 3.0 automates rollover production with the introduction of rollover styles. When, when you design a rollover state that you want to use over again, you can save it as a rollover style in the Styles palette. All of the attributes of the rollover, including its effects, slices, and states, are saved in the style, thus you can apply the rollover style with a click of your mouse. The graphic on the left shows the Rollover palette, and the image on the right is a Web page created using ImageReady and rollovers. Weighted Optimization: By choosing the new weighted optimization controls in Photoshop 6.0, you can use 8-bit alpha channels to set image optimization on a per pixel basis and smoothly vary compression settings across an image. In doing this, you can produce higher-quality results in critical image areas without having to slice up an image or handle the separate files that image slicing produces. Further, you are no longer restricted to the rectangular areas produced by slicing, but can optimize an image using the natural contours of different image areas. Using channels, you can produce gradual variations in GIF dithering, lossy GIF settings, and JPEG compression. Weighted optimization controls also let you favor colors in selected image areas as you generate custom color palettes. The image to the left shows the weighted optimization options. Enhanced Image Maps: With ImageReady 3.0, you can create navigational image maps by using the new rectangle, circle, and polygon image map tools to define hot spots and then associating URLs with them. The image map tools produce rectangular, square, circular, and freeform hot spots in images. You can also set up dynamic layer-based image maps that adapt to changes in the layer content. Once you've set up these hot spots, the image map select tool is available for selecting and modifying them. You can select a hot spot and then use the new Image Map palette to specify different attributes, such as a URL link and an Alt tag. The Image Map palette also lets you control the precise size and location of your hot spots. Finally, you can use the slicing controls and Animation and Rollover palettes to assign rollovers to image map hot spots. The image to the left shows a Web page with an image map that was created with ImageReady. The graphic to the right is a view of the ImageMap palette. Enhanced Contact Sheets: Photoshop 6.0 has a number of changes to make contact sheets more flexible. You can now define the font size for labels on a contact sheet, choose among a variety of customizable templates with and without HTML frames for the Web photo gallery, and select from predefined picture package templates that support different page sizes. Further, the picture package no longer adds borders around images, so the final image sizes meet expectations. The image to the right shows a view of the Web photo gallery options. Streamlined Interface: With Photoshop 6.0, Adobe has introduced numerous features designed to make it easier and more efficient to use the program. Now you can organize frequently used palettes in a new palette well where they are tucked out of your way but immediately accessible. There is a context-sensitive tool options bar that provides more direct and intuitive access to all of the options that control what you do with each tool. For instance, in previous versions of photoshop, brush options appeared in two different palettes. Now, in Photoshop 6.0, these options are all consolidated in one place--the context-sensitive tool options bar. You can also edit brushes on the fly through a contenxt-sensitive menu, adding them directly to the brushes library on the tool options bar. Finally, the context-sensitive toolbar and the Preset Manager give you one-click access to any brush libraries in the Brushes folder. On the Windows platform, the Open dialog box simplifies image selection with browsable thumbnails. Plus, you can find your most recently opened files in a Open Recent submenu and can set the default for how many files Photoshop lists there. Photoshop remembers where you last opened or saved files, so you can more easily access them in default locations. The global setting for your measurement system no longer prevents you from switching systems on the fly to make discrete changes. The graphic to the left shows the new interface. Enhanced Layer Management: The layer options in Photoshop 6.0 have been enhanced. Now you can create hundreds of layers in any image, not just the 99 layers you were previously limited to. Plus, you can organize those layers into sets to keep better track of related parts. You can then toggle the visibility of layer sets, hiding or showing them as you work; you can apply layer masks and layer clipping paths to layer sets; and you can specify a layer set's opacity. By color-coding layers in the Layers palette, you can quickly identify layer relationships. Once you organize your layers, you can lock them to prevent accidental edits to image data, transparency settings, and layer position. Or, you can lock layers before sending them out for others to review so you don't have to worry about unexpected changes. The enhanced Layers palette also helps you handle layer effects more easily. If you assign a layer effect to one layer and want to reuse it on another, just drag and drop it in the Layers palette list. All of the settings are preserved and instantly applied to the target layer. And you can delete layer effects by simply dragging the effect to the Layers palette trash bin. If you double-click on a layer effect in the palette list, a new Layer Style dialog box appears where you can adjust the settings. The image to the left shows the Layers palette with color coded layers. Preset Manager: The new Preset Manager in Photoshop 6.0 centralizes management of your custom brushes, gradients, shapes, contours, patterns, and layer styles. It also offers instant access to the extensive libraries of presets included with the program. And when you create your own custom presets, you can easily save them in library files using the Preset Manager. The Preset Manager is resizable, so you can easily scan the content you're loading. You can choose how to view the content--in large or small thumbnails, enlarge or small text lists with thumbnails, or as a text-only list. A useful feature is the ability to assign a name to any brush, swatch, pattern, or other preset. For example, you could build a set of swatches for a Web project, and assign names that tell others where to use them--such as "Background for log" or Main page nav bar." The names will then appear in any text list. Once you open a library with the Preset Manager, it's available for use in appropriate places, such as the context-sensitive tool options bar, the Layer Style dialog box, and the content layer dialog boxes. The picture on the left shows a view of the Preset Manager. Annotation Tools: Photoshop 6.0 has new annotation tools that let you embed written design notes or recorded voice comments directly in your files. For example, you can now append notes to clients or colleagues explaining how to review a file or what led up to certain design decisions. You could also include production notes if someone else is handling color correction and other image-editing tasks. You can then send an annotated Photoshop (PSD) or TIFF file to anyone who has Photoshop 6.0. Or you can save the file as a PDF with annotations and layers preserved and send it out to be reviewed in Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader. The image on the right shows a graphic with an annotation. Updated Color Management: This new version introduces less restrictive color-management controls which streamline configuration of a device-independent, color-managed workflow. All of the color management controls now appear in one dialog box for easy access, plus they come equipped with detailed built-in Help. You can choose between advanced and standard modes depending on how much control you want to exercise. There are also preset workflows, so it's easy to switch among standard U.S., European, and Japanese prepress settings. Or, you can set up your own custom workflow and save the settings for later use. You can set color management policies in advance or decide every time you open a new file whether to discard, preserve, or convert a color profile. The image on the left is a view of the color management options. Enhanced Crop Tool: The crop tool has a new place in the toolbox. It now appears at the top level of the toolbox instead of under the marquee selection tools. Also, the crop tool offers enhancements that make it more intuitive to use. For example, when you define a crop area, it now dims the area outside of the crop box, so you can visually check the crop and make any quick adjustments before you complete the action. You can also use the crop tool to transform the perspective of a cropped area, so you can repair a poorly scanned image. To eliminate perspective effects, you simply define a nonrectangular region. Photoshop automatically calculates the final cropped rectangular area based on the size and aspect ratio of the original picture. The photo to the right shows the crop tool in use. Revised Extract Image Command: The Extract Image was first introduced in Photoshop 5.5. The command provides accessible tools for masking intricate, hard-to-define edges, which previously required painstaking manual work to mask. Photoshop 6.0 now delivers an enhanced version of this command with new smart-highlighting, mask edge, and mask cleanup tools that can help you achieve refined results. When you choose Image > Extract and select the Smart Highlighting option, buildt-in edge detection technology in Photoshop helps you define the image area you want to extract. After filling the area, you can click Preview to check the extraction or click OK to see it directly in Photoshop. In Preview mode, the mask edge and mask cleanup tools are available for you to smooth edges as necessary, automatically filling or erasing areas to produce the best results. For the image to the left, I used the Extract tool to delete the background and then replaced it with another. |
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Adobe Photoshop 6.0 should please everyone, even those skeptics who love to tear apart upgrades and tell you,"don't bother, there is nothing new." I would consider upgrading from previous versions for just one of the features, for instance the text features, or the vector tools. But when you look at all the new and enhanced elements together, it is a no-brainer decision. It is definitely a must-have upgrade. |
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Windows Pentium or faster Intel processor Macintosh PowerPC processor |
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Graphics:
Adobe ImageStyler & Adobe Photoshop 6.0
Web Page Editor: Dreamweaver 4.0 Scanner: Hewlett Packard ScanJet 6250C Professional Series |
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