Hands on: Photoshop gains extra magic

In December last year, Adobe announced it was releasing a public beta of Photoshop CS3.

Since then, the beta has been available for download from the Adobe website.

By the time you read this, the finished product should be shipping and for a complete rundown of everything that the new version has to offer you’ll have to read the reviews, or buy the upgrade.

I’m not going to provide a full review here, but there are some new features that will have such a huge impact on the way we do things with Photoshop I think they’re worthy of some Hands On scrutiny.

I’m going to confine myself to talking about some of the new features that impact on techniques previously covered in Hands On. These are, pretty much by definition, digital imaging tasks that are frequently undertaken and often form part of the routine image-editing workflow.

The CS3 public beta is available for both Windows and Mac platforms, the latter being a universal binary that will run natively on Intel Macs. It’s time limited and, unless you have a valid serial number for an earlier version, you’ll get a mere 48 hours in which to play with the new version. As (bad) luck would have it, the beta wasn’t interested in my perfectly legitimate serial number, so it looks as if my days are numbered.

As well as Photoshop, the download contains CS3 beta versions of Adobe Bridge, Adobe Stock Photos and a new application called Device Central, which allows you to create templates for mobile devices.

New selections
It’s testament to the fact that making selections is such a core activity that Photoshop CS3’s only new tool is for making selections. The Quick Selection tool shares a toolbox flyout with the Magic Wand. Adobe must feel quite confident that this will quickly become the tool of choice for making quick, accurate selections as they’ve made it the default – if you want the Magic Wand tool you’ll have to switch to it from the flyout.

After a few minutes working with the Quick Selection tool, I have to say that Adobe’s confidence is not misplaced. It’s easy to use and it just works – you hardly need to think about it. The Quick Selection tool is a brush, so the only things you really need to set from the Tool Options palette are its size and hardness. Painting inside your intended selection area picks up like-coloured pixels all the way to an obvious boundary.

As it stands, the Quick Selection tool would be a very useful addition to the toolbox, but selections can be further refined using the Refine Edge controls. Five sliders provide a very high degree of edge control; Radius and Contrast improve soft-edged details, Smooth acts like a variable anti-alias, feather blurs the selection edge and a contract/expand slider changes the size of the entire selection area.

Five buttons provide a variety of preview options, including a standard selection border, a quick mask, an alpha channel mask and preview selection on black and white. This last one is useful for checking for fringing on selections that are going to be cut and pasted.