Product Reviews

The last couple of Photoshop upgrades were largely interface enhancements, with one or two real gems thrown in to keep the punters happy. Photoshop CS2 breaks that mould: this rock-solid upgrade delivers many of the major features we've been asking for, plus some truly outstanding gadgets we'd never have dreamed of.

The biggest single feature is envelope distortion. It's something users have been requesting for years, and its implementation is both easy to use and accurate. Here's how it works: take a layer, group of layers or a selection, and enter Free Transform mode. A new Image Warp button appears on the toolbar: if you press this, handles appear around the object. Each of the four corners has its own pair of Bezier handles, each of which initially reaches a third of the way across each side. This effectively divides the image into a 3x3 grid. Dragging the Bezier handles will warp the image, together with the grid. The real innovation is the fact that the intersections of the horizontals and verticals are also draggable vertices that can be moved independently of both the corners and the Bezier curves, adding a further four control points in the centre of the object. It's like having envelope distortion and mesh distortion at the same time.

As well as using custom distortions, you can also begin with one of the presets. These are the same as the distortions offered by Text Warp in previous releases, and include Arch, Bulge, Flag and so on. Rather than using sliders on a dialog, though, the amount and direction of warping are set by dragging control points directly on the object grids. Each of these presets can then be turned into a custom warp, giving full access to the handles. You can even switch back and forth between Free Transform and Image Warp during the distortion process. You can now even change the opacity of a layer during the transformation or warp process. Best of all, perhaps, Image Warp is carried out directly on the artwork, rather than through a dialog.

We may have been begging for Image Warp, but we never expected the new Vanishing Point filter, a perspective tool of such power it takes your breath away. Begin by marking four corner points on any easily identifiable rectangular surface within the image - a window, for example. Instantly, a grid is drawn that maps on to this surface. You can then drag the grid edges to reach to the edges of the wall, and they'll stretch in perspective. Command-drag an edge handle and you'll 'tear off' a new perspective plane that's at right angles to the previous one: you can continue in this way to fill every right-angled corner in the image.

Now for the clever bit. If you use the Marquee tool within this dialog to select a rectangle, it will be selected in perspective on your chosen surface. When you move it around, the area within the rectangle is copied in true perspective, anywhere you choose to place it. Move it around a corner, and it will map on to the new wall. You can also use the Clone tool within the Vanishing Point dialog to clone in perspective - even around corners. Even painting within the dialog will paint in perspective. Any object on the clipboard will appear within the Vanishing Point preview, and can be moved around in perspective. You can also scale and rotate all pasted items and selections using Free Transform while in Vanishing Point.

There are many innovations in the Vanishing Point dialog. You can apply feathering to rectangles after the selection has been moved; Healing can be turned on and off, with the option of luminance healing only to blend selections in with their surroundings; and the Clone tool shows not a circle for the brush size, but a fuzzy-edged image of the clone operation that will take place, allowing for perfect alignment with no guesswork. We hope many of these new modes of working will find their way into the rest of Photoshop in time.

Anyone with a digital camera will be grateful for two new filters: Lens Correction and Noise Reduction. The former fixes barrelling and pincushioning distortions, and enables you to rotate and correct for keystone distortion. You can remove vignette shadowing with user-definable midpoint and darken-lighten amounts, and there are chromatic aberration sliders for correcting red/cyan and blue-yellow fringing. A user-defined grid aids exact positioning and correcting, and you can drag the grid around in the preview window so it aligns precisely with any orthogonal axis in the scene.

The Noise Reduction filter compensates for digital image noise and film grain, and can also remove Jpeg artefacts. Colour noise removal is a standard component, and an advanced mode allows per-channel adjustment while viewing the RGB composite in the main preview window.

Smart Sharpen is a new filter that takes a lot of the guesswork out of such processes as Unsharp Mask. You can now sharpen highlights, midtones and shadows independently, and there are presets for removing Gaussian Blur, Lens Blur and Motion Blur. Smart Sharpen is

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complemented by several new Blur filters: Surface Blur, which blurs texture but leaves hard edges and outlines untouched; Lens Blur, which simulates depth-of-field effects on cameras; Box Blur, which averages the colours of neighbouring pixels; and Shape Blur, which uses any preset or user-defined shape as the defining distortion kernel.

One drawback of working in Photoshop - or any bitmap editor for that matter - is that each rotation, distortion and transformation necessarily degrades the affected layer. All of that changes with the introduction of Smart Objects, which allow you to embed the data that makes up layers - or groups of layers - within a reference source, which is saved to disk. This reference is used each time a transformation takes place: when working with placed artwork, such as Illustrator files, it means you can apply any number of scaling operations, including scaling, rotation and even warping, without destructive results. Each time you edit the object, the source data is used.

You can use Smart Objects several times within a project. If the source data is edited, every instance of the related Smart Object within the Photoshop file will be updated to reflect that change - just like in Illustrator. Also borrowed from Illustrator are data-driven graphics in the form of Variables, which enable Photoshop to import data from spreadsheets and databases automatically.

Photoshop CS2 also introduces Smart Guides - that is, automatic guidelines that pop up whenever a layer being moved or transformed aligns with other layers within the artwork. These, too, originated in Illustrator a couple of releases back.

This is the last version of Photoshop in which ImageReady will remain a separate application, so there are no developments to that program in this release. Instead, parts of ImageReady are beginning to creep into the main program.

For example, Photoshop now sports its own Animation palette, which means you can now create web elements such as animated GIFs directly, without recourse to another application.

Among the interface changes in Photoshop CS2 are modifications to the way the Layers palette works. You can now select multiple layers by shift-clicking in the palette to select a contiguous range of layers, or command-clicking (as in Finder selections) to select non-contiguous layers. You can then move and transform these layers as a set, without having to link them the next time you select one of them - it will be selected on its own.

Furthermore, you can now select multiple layers by holding down the command key when the Move tool is active and dragging over part of the layers on the artwork in just the same way as you select multiple objects in Illustrator. You can, of course, still link layers in the old way.

Some of the terminology has also changed. 'Grouping' now refers to creating a layer set, and the command-G shortcut does just that; option-command-G is now used for grouping in the old sense, now consolidated as Make Clipping Mask.

Professional photographers' needs have also been taken into consideration in this release. Camera Raw import has been speeded up, enabling faster processing of multiple images. Moreover, you can edit the settings of multiple files in Adobe Bridge (see p38) before opening them in Photoshop. There are now checkboxes to allow position exposure, shadow, brightness and contrast settings, based on image data rather than the camera default, and you can copy and paste settings between Raw files. You can even place Raw files as Smart Objects so the placed file is automatically updated when you edit Raw settings. You can also convert images to DNG (Digital Negative) format for non-destructive batch editing.

Photoshop CS2 has also introduced HDR - 32-bit, high dynamic range images of around 100,000:1, as opposed to the 100:1 range of standard 'LDR' images. You can create HDR images by shooting the same scene with several exposures (five to seven images are recommended), then using Exposure Merge to blend them into a single image composed of the data from them all.

A new Red-eye tool performs its task more easily than the Color Replacement Tool, and with greater accuracy, too. Meanwhile, the new Spot Healing tool performs a similar function to the Healing Brush but without the need to sample for a target region. Designed for small areas, such as spots and blemishes, it's the easiest patching tool of all to use.

Among the many other improvements, are: customisable menus that allow you to highlight frequently used items and remove unwanted ones; video preview via a FireWire link; a Shadow/Highlight adjustment that now works in CMYK and RGB; enhanced save options for PDF creation; and the enhanced Help system now uses a floating window rather than opening in a browser.

Photoshop's font menus now show a sample of each font. But instead of displaying the name of the font in its own typeface (which rendered such fonts as Zapf Dingbats unintelligible), the word 'Sample' appears in the typeface next to the name. You can change the size of this sample lettering through a Preference pane.

This is the most significant upgrade of Photoshop since Layers were introduced in version 3. The powerful and versatile Image Warp tool will please almost all users, and the Vanishing Point filter will amaze and delight everyone. It's rare that we're given so much all in one go; this is, without question, the must-have upgrade of the year.

NEEDS: PowerPC G3 or later + Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later + 384MB RAM, 512MB-1GB recommended + 1024 x 768 minimum display