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This article is from August 28, 2000, and is no longer current.

An In-Depth Look at Photoshop 6

In this column, I usually start off with a brief look at what’s happening in the graphics market, then we wrap up with a quick graphics tip or tutorial. But this time, the news it so big, I’m dedicating the entire column to it.

This morning, at Seybold San Francisco, Adobe will officially announce Adobe Photoshop 6.0, and took the wraps off what is arguably the most broad sweeping update of Photoshop since version 3.0 was introduced back in 1994. This new version is packed with enhancements, improvements, new tools and new features, all wrapped around a much improved, more intuitive interface, that is going to make the decision to upgrade to 6, a no-brainer for any Photoshop user. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Photoshop 6.0 is that Adobe was able to create a significantly more powerful version of Photoshop, but at the same time they found a way to make it easier to use and easier to learn. That’s a balance few upgrades of any software have ever been able to achieve.

Adobe packed this upgrade with some very useful, and very cool new features so I’m going to get right to the meat of it, down to the bone, and dig right in (I shouldn’t write these articles when I’m hungry).

A New Streamlined interface
Remember all those annoying tool Options palettes? Good news — they’re gone. They’ve been replaced by a Tool Options Bar that is docked directly below Photoshop’s menu bar. When you click on a tool, the Options Bar immediately displays that tool’s options. For example, when you click on the Paintbrush tool, it immediately displays the currently selected brush, the paint blend modes pop-up menu, the opacity for the tools, and a check box for Wet Edges. You can also access the Brushes flyout menu from here — the Brushes palette as you knew it, is gone — and load extra sets of brushes with just one click. Same thing with accessing and loading gradients. Very, very handy. This Options Bar brings the power of Photoshop’s tools to the front, rather than having them buried inside options palette that many users often ignored (out of sight, out of mind).


Direct Type Entry

Ladies and Gentlemen, oh happy day, the huge Type dialog box is gone forever, because now you can just click in your image and start typing. You can enter your type directly within your image, and to me, this one new feature alone is worth the upgrade price. Once you’ve entered your type, you can control your type attributes (font, size, etc.) from the Options Bar, or you can access even more type features from the new Character palette. It looks and acts very much like Adobe Illustrator’s Character palette, so many people will instantly feel right at home. Oh yeah, here’s another huge improvement: Now you can colorize your type character by character, rather than having to choose one color for the entire text block as in previous versions.

Type Power
Not only can you enter type directly on screen, Adobe has basically created a new and improved type engine that gives you an array of typographic control that feels more like a page layout application than an image-editing program. You could already control kerning, leading, baseline shift and things like that, but now you have paragraph controls like first line indent, more advanced justification options, the ability to add space at the end /beginning of paragraphs, built-in hyphenation for the English language, the ability to create blocks of type that automatically wrap at the ends of lines, all caps, small caps, plus the addition of one of Adobe InDesign’s coolest features for balancing justified type: the single line and multi-line composer. This version even supports Ligatures and Old Style characters. This is a level of typographic control that I thought would be years away for Photoshop, but it’s all here today.

Type Warping
Besides the ability to make type look beautiful, you now have the ability to warp type into arches, arcs, and generally squeeze, distort, warp and stretch type while still maintaining its editablity. The new Text Warp function gives you a whole new level of control for making your type out of control. It’s not exactly type on the path, but it’s certainly the next best thing.

Layers Effects on Steroids
Back in version 5.0, Adobe introduced Layers Effects, which gave you the ability to apply effects like glows, bevel and emboss, drop shadows, inner shadows, etc. to an entire layer at one time. As you updated the layer, the effects would update as well. They were well received by users and they’re very useful in creating special effects now, in Photoshop 6.0, they’re called Layer Styles, but they should have been called “Extreme Effects” because they are high-powered versions of their predecessors with so many new features, and new styles, that the more you dig, the more cool stuff you uncover. Adobe spent some serious time on this aspect of the application and you’ll start seeing a whole new level of special effects because of them. Besides that, you can now combine your own custom settings of Layers Effects to create your own custom Styles, and save them to the new Styles palette. Once you’ve done that, you’re just one click away from applying these complex effects to any layer. Plus, Photoshop 6.0 comes with about 100 preset Styles for creating everything from text effects, to instant Web buttons, to texture effects. This is going to change everything. You’ll see entire Web sites popping up to trade/exchange custom Style settings. Very, very cool.

Vector Shapes
Another brand new feature that’s sure to shake things up is the new Shapes tools. These new tools include a vector rectangle, rounded corner box, line tool, polygon tool, Ellipse tool, and a Custom Shape tool. When you choose the Custom Shape tool, you have a access to a large collection of preset shapes you can access from the Options Bar, including shapes like stars, hearts, arrows, star bursts, fish, moons, triangles and many more. Plus you can create and store your own custom shapes. What’s more, if you print directly from Photoshop or save to PDF for printing, you can maintain the crisp vector lines for printing. Same thing with Photoshop’s vector type. Think about it — now you can combine pixel-based art with clean vector type and shapes.

It Can Slice. It Can Dice.
There’s another guest in the Tool palette. The Slice tools (each looks like a knife) let you slice your graphics for the Web from directly within Photoshop (rather than having to jump over to ImageReady for slicing). Plus, a new feature let’s Photoshop do the work for you by having it create slices for you from your layered Photoshop document (it also creates the necessary tables and accompanying HTML file too).

Layer Management
Now you can combine layers into their own folders (called Layer Sets), right from within the Layers palette to help you organize and sort your Layers as you work. You can also color code layers for quick visual identification as well. At the bottom of the Layers palette, you can now access Photoshop’s Layers Effect (Styles) from a pop-up menu, as well as Adjustment Layers. You can also lock layers and keep them from being moved or edited at your discretion by clicking the appropriate checkboxes at the top of the Layers palette. Another new Layers feature are Content Layer, which enable you to add layers that apply gradients, color fills, and patterns to the layers that appear beneath it. You can edit, change the stacking order, and delete these Content Layers much like you would an Adjustment Layer.

Web Power
Adobe has added even more Web features in this update, and they include a new version of Adobe ImageReady (version 3.0) with tighter integration with Photoshop than in previous versions. ImageReady 3.0 has improved rollover capabilities, enhanced animation capabilities including the ability to use text warping in animations, refined image map creation, the ability to save slice sets so you can output only the slices you want to optimize. Probably the most important new Web feature in Photoshop 6.0 is the ability to create “Weighted Optimization,” which is where you use an Alpha Channel to smoothly vary the levels of compression within one image to create the smallest possible file size, yet maintaining detail in critical areas. As far as I know, Photoshop is the first and only application to have this advanced optimization feature, and probably is an answer to many a Web designers prayers.

Presets Galore
One of most welcome new features is the ability to store, and manage the hundreds of preset brushes, gradients, patterns, textures, and shapes that come with Photoshop 6.0. Now, loading a new set of brushes is as easy as choosing them from the Brushes flyout’s pop-down menu. They load instantly — no more digging through your drive to locate the various sets of brushes, gradients, and patterns.

Liquify!
Probably the most fun new feature in Photoshop 6.0 is the Liquify command, which lets you take an image and smudge it around like it was liquid. It’s got a pretty easy to use interface and does a nice job, particularly with photos of bosses or relatives. Don’t ask me why, it just does.

Improved Automations
Adobe has done a very nice job in updating some of their more popular automations, which are like scripts that carry out some very complex tasks without breaking a sweat. For example, in their Contact Sheet automation (which can automatically put a folder of images onto one printed page, to your specifications) now has the ability to control the point size of the font. Sounds like a little tweak, but it’s huge. However, the biggest automation update was to the Web Gallery plug-in, which automates the process of putting your images on the web. This new version lets you choose from different layouts, backgrounds, and gives you a wide level of control over how your final HTML page will look (Yes, it creates the HTML page for you). You can even choose from different templates, including versions with frames. They did a great job on updating this one — much more than I expected.

Updated Color Management
They’ve taken all those different color management dialog boxes and thankfully put them in one Color Settings dialog box that significantly easier to use. They included a number of presets for the type of work you’re doing, and you can create your own custom set-ups and choose them from a pop-up list. This is a major enhancement and color management will be much more manageable for most people.

Print Preview
They’ve greatly improved Photoshop’s print dialog box which now includes a large print preview that will help you avoid surprises at the final output stage. There are also controls for adjusting its position and scales within this dialog as well. Very welcome changes here.

More Actionable
This new version enables even more of Photoshop commands and functions to be recorded as actions. Perhaps even more important is the ability to create Actions Droplets, which you can leave on your desktop where you can drag and drop files, or entire folders, onto these droplets and they’ll carry out the action assigned to them. For people in a production environment, this will be a big time saver.

Better Extraction
Adobe added two key enhancements to its very slick Extract feature it added back in Photoshop 5.5. First off, you now have an undo in the Extract dialog box. They also added two new tools to help you fine tune your “extraction.” The new tools are nice. The undo is worth its weight in gold.

Better Cropping for Everyone
Buried beneath other tools and cast aside for nearly six years, the Crop Tool has made its way back to the front level of the Tool bar, and at the same time Adobe added some new enhancements to the cropping features that make the tool easier and more powerful to use. One enhancement is the ability to see a preview of the cropped version of your image by dimming (kind of like backscreening) the areas that will be cropped away. You can also fix keystone distortion problems in photos using the Crop tool’s new perspective crop.

Annotation
You can also attach little notes to your Photoshop images. This is great if you’re collaborating with other artists on an individual image, or if you want to write a brief note to yourself or a client. OK, not the most exciting feature of this upgrade, but it doesn’t hurt.

Fixing, Tweaking, Improving
Another thing you’ll find throughout this upgrade is lots of little tweaks and improvements, including new preference settings, little tweaks in dialog boxes, and lots of little enhancements application wide.

Whew! That’s a quick look at the major new features in this update. As you can see, it’s a very broad update. The only things that didn’t get updated were the tonal controls (Levels, Curves, etc.) and there aren’t really any new filters (if you don’t count Liquify, which seems like a filter, but it’s not under the Filter menu.). Lots of great stuff here, including some things I didn’t have time to get to.

I think you can tell from the tone of my news blurb that I really like, OK, love, this new version of Photoshop. I’ve been using 6.0 in beta for a few months now, and I have to tell you, after using 6.0, it’s almost painful to go back and use 5.5. It’s a very solid update from top to bottom, and in my opinion, it’s the clearest “must-upgrade” Adobe’s had in long while. This is definitely an upgrade that will be quickly embraced by users across the board, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more people upgrade faster than in any previous version since 3.0.

The upgrade price for Photoshop 6.0 from previous versions is $199. If you have Photoshop LE, you can upgrade for $499, and if you don’t have Photoshop at all, it sells for $609. For more info you can visit Adobe’s Web site.

Yes, we know that you’re wondering about Photoshop and Mac OS X. Photoshop 6.0 will work on Mac OS X, but isn’t native at this point. That will come later, Senior Product Manager Kevin Connor told MacCentral.

That’s it for this news update. See you next week with my regular assortment of news, tips, and tutorials.

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