Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0 Review

I take a lot of still images with my digital camera and find that invariably they need to be tweaked one way or another. That’s when I call upon the power of Adobe® Photoshop®. Adobe’s® Photoshop® Elements, Photoshop’s® little ‘sister’, doesn’t quite do it for me. Mac-users will be happy to know that version 7 is OS X compatible. It is recommended that Mac users run 10.1.3 or higher for maximum use, but it will run in OS Xx as well as OS 9 .

One of the most significant changes in Version 7, a minor change in the Toolbox but a major impact for users is the addition of the ‘healing brush’. (see Figure 1b). Compare the two Toolboxes, Version 6 (Figure 1a) and Version 7 (see Figure 1b).

Figure 1a shows the Toolbox for Photoshop’s® Version 6 which includes the airbrush tool.

Figure 1b Photoshop’s® Version 7 shows that the Toolbox replaces the airbrush with the ‘Healing brush/patch tool’.

The Healing Brush

You use the healing brush like the clone tool, but the BIG difference here is, according to Adobe’s PR is “the Healing Brush tool also matches the texture, lighting, and shading of the sampled pixels to the source pixels. As a result, the repaired pixels blend seamlessly into the rest of the image.” This is a MAJOR accomplishment, a timesaver and sanity-maintainer for the end-user!

For example, recently I scanned some images of a friend’s son. He has some facial blemishes which I wanted to eliminate.

I could have used the clone tool, but it would have been harder and more tedious to match particular skin tonal variations and lighting. Instead, I played with the Healing Brush and like magic, I saw new skin appear before my eyes, incorporating the texture, highlights, shadows and color of the sampled area. Sounds easier that it was. I really had to play with the healing brush and the various options before getting the hang of it. But once you ‘get it’, you probably won’t use the cloning tool again for these types of things. The cloning tool has its purpose, but in this instance, the Healing Brush was the tool of choice.

Below is an illustration of the Healing Brush results, the before and after if you will.
Before, the dog has an “alfalfa-like” hair doodle on top of her head. After the Healing Brush was applied, the dog looks like she has had her hair combed!

After the Healing Brush

Before the Healing Brush

A second major improvement to Version 7 has to do with the FILE>OPEN features. As you can see in Figure 2, Version 7 now shows a preview of the image. This is extremely helpful especially when images have not been named!

Figure 2

Figure 3

Version 7 also includes more FILE FORMAT options as you can see in Figure 3. This is handy when you want to see only JPEG files or PICT files, not all 150 assorted files.

A really terrific addition to Version 7 has to do with the BRUSHES.

Figure 4

In the upper left corner of the Menu Bar, there is a Brush icon. To the right of that is a Brush preset picker icon and triangle for a drop down menu. Clicking on that triangle gives you an array of brush types as evidenced in Figure 4. You can resize the window, change the diameter of the brush, or click on another triangle which gives you a drop down menu for more Brush options like creating a New Brush, reset Brushes, Load Brushes, Replace brushes with the current brushes or append current set, etc. (See Figure 5).

Figure 5

Along with the hundreds of brush types to select from are brush widths, opacity, flow (key for users with graphics tablets like the Wacom), and mode options. A plethora of brushes for the discriminating artist. I must have spent over two hours just playing with the various brush sets alone! Reminds me of the program Painter®.

Last but not least, one of the things that most impresses me about Adobe® Photoshop® is the TEXT feature. Version 7 incorporates desktop publishing qualities much like Version 6, but the new version adds Faux italic, All Caps, Small Caps, Superscript, Subscript, Underline, and Strikethrough options as seen in Figure 6 near the bottom of the window.

Figure 6

Figure 7

Version 7 also includes text manipulation features like kerning, leading, tracking, vertical and horizontal scaling, baseline shift, text and font size selection, style, color; the ability to align text left, center, right; indent left margin, indent first line, indent right margin; add a space between paragraphs and add space after paragraphs; justify last line left, justify last line right, and justify last line centered or justify all. (See Figure 7). Very powerful desktop publishing features that you would find in higher priced programs like QuarkXPress®.

Another change/improvement in version 7 is the Type Tool drop down menu for the horizontal, vertical type and horizontal or vertical type mask tool as seen in Figure 8. In the previous version, this feature lived up in the Options Bar.

Folks upgrading from Photoshop version 5x will see HUGE improvements, too numerous to expound upon here; folks upgrading from version 6x will be very impressed with the features I’ve talked about.

Adobe® has long been associated with quality products. Photoshop® is at the top of the list. Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0 is THE image-editing program for professionals and amateurs alike. Golly, with the desktop editing and image editing features, I could use Photoshop® alone to do my next club newsletter, save it as a .pdf using Adobe® Acrobat® and upload it to the website. I give it an A+.

Review by Kathy Aanestad, Photoshop 7 Review, SVCG Newsletter Editor

Figure 8

Imagine all the people... the possibilities of what you can do online are limitless!

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