“The long awaited is here and it was well worth the wait! Photoshop 7.0 takes digital image editing to new heights” Well this did not seem like such a long wait. The upgrade to Photoshop 6.0 was totally transforming and it seemed like years in the making. With it Photoshop fully entered the digital world of photo-editing and took control. And now with 7.0 the best photo-editing program on the market just has improved itself again with its logo of the magnified eye focusing its gaze both on digital photography and of course, the Web. Beginning with the incidental changes, Photoshop 7.0 has a new color tool bar. The colors in the toolbar below are grey and become the individual colored icons below when you pass your mouse over them to use them. Also new it the way that you change the size of the tool you are using. Photoshop now has a slide bar that you move sideways with your mouse to change with most of the tools: One of the most useful of the changes, and certainly the most noticeable change is the addition of the Filebrowser to Photoshop.
Filebrowser constitutes a major portion of Photoshop software in a big way and is considered a leading figure in this field despite getting competition from rival brands as photoshop mac free is a modern day norm that has become a huge game changer in the photoshop field through which people can use image editing at their will.
Right in the center of Photoshop, either docked or floating, we can now browse our pictures as thumbnails. We can rotate them, view them in different capacities, and as you will note below at the bottom left of the browser, you can view all the details you could possibly need of any given photo. Just drag the photo you wish to use or double-click on it and the photo appears on the Photoshop desktop ready to edit: It is useful to note the menu choices below for the Filebrowser. At the bottom you will see a choice called “export cache.” This allows you to save any changes you make to the browser including rotating. But more than saving any rotation, if you save the cache you will not have to wait the next time you wish to access the folder. The first time you load the files, it takes some time to load all the thumbnails, but after saving the cache, the access to the folder is immediate. Using the Filebrowser you can rename files in a folder with a number of different options on how you might rename them. This is particularly useful with folders of large amounts of numbered files that come downloaded from digital cameras.
The cameras usually give a letter followed by numbers for the name of each picture. This makes it hard to identify pictures related to a given theme. The pictures below were from a church talent show and easily renamed themselves to talentshow01, etc. Here is the finished results now in the folder: There is a new Autocolor option in the Image menu which is very nice for basically doing automatically what has been available in the levels and curves option: The Autocolor is set by default to enhancing the “Per Channel Contrast”, but you can change it to find the dark and light colors of the image or to enhance its black and white perspective: Even on the fuzzy picture below of the boy jamming out on the piano the auto color option improves the picture quite remarkably. Here is the improved picture: The next tool, called the Healing Brush and its compliment, the Patch tool. In my opinion, this new tool is worth the price of Photoshop…it is that profound an addition to the tool bar. To explain this tool, let us first take a normal picture taken with a digital flash: How often do we see pictures like this where some part of the picture is which from the flash like the forehead of the woman and the glasses of the man. What the healing brush does is take a piece of another part of the picture and allows you to drop the piece upon releasing the mouse onto the area of the picture you wish to be changed.
What the tool then does is blend or heal the whole area by matching the light and shade of the area around the area to be healed. The effect is to blend the dropped areas seamlessly into the new area. Just look at the results below. On the woman, I dropped another piece of the skin tone onto her forehead, and onto the man, I took the bottom part of the glasses that had no white flash in them and placed them on the lighted part of the glasses. All of this took about 5 seconds and you have a clear picture below with little effort. The patch tool does a similar thing with larger areas. For it, you use a lasso cursor to make a circle around the area you wish to change. I have lassoed the whole flash area of this fish tank. What you do next is drag that lassoed area to another area of the picture and it will blend the new area into the originally lassoed area, blending the color, the brightness and the texture. Below you see the results. The flash is gone and it merely looks like a brightness coming from the top of the tank rather than a flash onto the glass. Both of these tools allow for adjustments such as feathering the area to the degree you wish.
I for one used the cloning tool quite often, which tends, when you clone an area to leave a tiled look that anyone who knows of the tool will recognize the picture as doctored. You really have had to spend a good deal of time on a larger area to get it to look professional. Some of this is truly cured by the healing and patch tools. Photoshop now has a vast range of brush of brush strokes with plenty of different textures and appeals: If, for example, you use a stylus pen, there are many setting below to aid in the way the stroke goes onto the desktop pallet. The brush strokes have also gotten bigger, allowing for strokes above the 999 pixel limit in earlier versions. Here is one result with tracing around the woman below with one of the textured brush strokes: Another quite useful tool is the Pattern maker, which allows for the creation of seamless patterns. Let me show you how useful it is by showing you the two icons below. I want the one on the left to have the same gold color as the icon on the right. When I have used the clone tool before, the pattern has been far from seamless. I click on the icon at the right above in Photoshop and then access the pattern maker: When the box comes up, the icon or picture I just accessed is in the box.
To the left is a little square that when you click on it and then move your mouse to the picture, you can take a piece of the picture of and then have it tiled. After the first tiling, which places it non-seamlessly on the page, you can keep generating the tile unit it no longer has any seam in it. Then you same the seamless tile in the stamp pallet. So it now, by your own making, becomes a stamp stroke that you can access when you select a brush stroke: From there it becomes quite easy to select the stamp tool below and then make the halo the color of the stamp. The process is quite simple: Another quite nice feature is the Picture Package. You can take one picture on your Photoshop desktop, click on the picture package, and select from the layout choices below: I selected 2 4 x 5 picture and several other sizes. To have it print out nicely, I also selected a resolution of 300, and you can see below the other choices. The other thing that I can do that is so very convenient is to change any selection to another photo by double clicking on the photo. What comes up is the file access that allows me to put any picture in any of the boxes.
Then I click OK and the photos are made on my Photoshop desktop, ready for printing. Though there are many other changes as well, I will add that the new spellchecker is a very nice addition for checking spelling right in Photoshop rather than in some other word processing program. So you can see that the program is filled with new features and improvements that make upgrading an absolute pleasure.
Healing Brush to effortlessly remove artifacts such as dust, scratches, blemishes, and wrinkles while preserving shading, lighting, and texture Web output enhancements to easily apply transparency or partial transparency to Web page elements, including seamless edges that blend into any Web background Single, enhanced Rollover palette to manage Web page rollovers, animations, and image maps more easily New “selected” rollover state for creating more sophisticated Web site navigation bars without hand-coding Customizable workspace for saving the arrangement of palettes and settings for tools, and instant access to a personalized Photoshop desktop Publish hi-res, modem friendly, zoom and pan images for any Website with ease using Viewpoint ZoomView Pattern Maker plug-in to create realistic or abstract patterns such as grass, rocks, and sand simply by selecting a section of an image Enhanced Liquify (distorting) tool to allow you to view other layers, zoom, pan, and undo multiple steps — even save custom meshes and apply them to other files Photoshop 7.0 Scripting plug-in ( Mac Win ) to automate repetitive tasks and key workflows using rich scripting support for JavaScript, AppleScript, and Microsoft Visual Basic Password protection to limit access to Photoshop PDF files, helping to secure image integrity Built-in Spell Checker for search-and-replace operations and spell-check in multiple languages within the same file Enhanced Picture Packages to allow you to print multiple images on one page, choose different page sizes, and add custom labels, such as copyright notices or captions More Web Gallery templates to easily show work online by posting a gallery page of images, and include watermark and copyright information to protect images Full compatibility with Mac OS 9 and support for the newest enhancements of Mac OS X and Microsoft® Windows® XP XMP support for embedding metadata in application files to easily repurpose, archive, and automate files in a workflow Microsoft® Windows® 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows NT® with Service Pack 6a, Windows 2000 with Service Pack 2, or Copyright (c) 2002, GMP Services Inc., All Rights Reserved
