It's hard to know where to start with Photoshop. This program has ruled the photo-editing market for more than a decade and, at the professional end of the market, it simply doesn't have any serious competition.

On the surface, Photoshop CS looks very much like its cutdown stablemate, Photoshop Elements. It has the same tool palette, containing a fairly standard selection of tools including Crop, Paintbrush, Erase, Fill and Text. It's only when you start to look below the surface that you discover the real depth and variety.

Most of the tools in the tool palette lead to additional popup menus that provide more powerful tools not found in Photoshop Elements. For instance, in addition to the standard Paintbrush, Photoshop has an option called the History brush that allows you to paint over an image and selectively return parts of the image to its original state, while leaving the rest of it untouched.

Alongside the standard Clone tool, Photoshop has an extremely useful feature called the Healing brush. Like the Clone tool, this copies pixels from one part of an image to another, but it also adjusts the lighting and texture of the copied pixels so they match the original pixels that you?re painting over. If you wanted to remove some wrinkled skin from a picture of someone's face, you could simply select an area of unblemished skin and use it to paint over the wrinkles and Photoshop will preserve the original lighting and texture of the skin.

Another variation on this tool is the Colour replacement command. This allows you to take a colour from one area and use it to replace a chosen colour elsewhere. This is much more sophisticated than the common Fill command in that it preserves the texture of the original image, so you could change the colour of some corduroy trousers while still preserving the texture of the material.

This latest version also includes productivity aids that allow you to achieve results more quickly than you could with rival programs. Most applications include controls for adjusting the lighting within an over- or under-exposed photograph, but these controls tend to work globally and adjust the entire image all at once. Photoshop's Shadow/Highlight command can analyse a photograph and identify discrete areas of shadow and light. It can then selectively adjust each area in a different way, lightening dark areas or toning down areas that are too bright. You might be able to achieve similar results in other programs but it would take a lot longer.

Photoshop also includes dozens of filters that can be used to create a variety of special effects. There are artistic filters that can make a photo look like a charcoal sketch or watercolour painting, or extravagant special effects such as Liquefy and Zig zag, which can distort your images in various ways. Photoshop has also given rise to a thriving market for third-party plug-in filters that can be used to add new tools and effects to the program.

For web design work, Photoshop comes bundled with Image Ready, a program which specifically focuses on web graphics. It includes some versatile compression and previewing options that allow you to quickly compare the effects of different compression settings on an image. It also has some quick and easy tools for creating image maps and rollover buttons.

Photoshop's vast power does have its drawbacks, though. It takes a lot of time and effort to even scratch the surface of its apparently endless list of features, and the program's extremely high price marks it out as a tool for professional designers and photographers only.

Photoshop is undoubtedly the most powerful photoediting program currently available, and it's clearly the first choice for professional users. However, hobbyists and business users will probably be better off with the less expensive Photoshop Elements or one of its other mid-range rivals.

Contact: Adobe 020 8358 5857
www.adobe.co.uk

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