The
long awaited PHOTOSHOP 7 was previewed at the March 7 LBMG meeting. The
program has been upgraded to work natively in OS X 10.1.1 and higher,
in addition to running on OS 9.1 and 9.2. Photoshop 7 now requires 128
MB of RAM to open the program. Photoshop 7 won't be shipping until the
second quarter of this year, but Adobe is accepting pre orders for the
Photoshop 7 upgrade for $149.
Here
are some of the new features in Photoshop 7 that you will find to be addicting:
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There
are now two new tools on the toolbar taking the old airbrush position
(the airbrush is now with the paintbrush and pencil). This is the
Healing Brush Tool and the Patch Tool, which work incredibly well.
With the Healing Brush, you sample a good area and click in the bad
area and it blends in the good area with the bad area to take away
wrinkles, bruises, etc. almost like magic. The Patch Tool does the
same sort of correction on dust or scratches in a document. Click,
click—all done!
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Back
in Photoshop 7 is the Brush Palette, and it has been expanded to show
a preview of the brush and to allow new Brush Options including shape
dynamics, scattering, texture, a dual brush and other dynamics that
includes opacity jitter, flow jitter, color jitter, chroma jitter
and lightness jitter. Some of the new brush features remind you of
brushes in Procreate's Painter 7.
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Texture
Maker is included in the program to make seamless textures automatically.
Need to add some grass or trees to your image? You can now do it in
seconds!
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Another
powerful new feature that I had problems showing at the meeting due
to the projector is the file browser. This feature takes away all
the guessing when you need to open a new image as it gives a large
thumbnail as well as a description of every Photoshop file in any
folder.
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Tool
presets. Now you can set up a particular tool (Brush tool, crop tool,
type tool -- you name it) using your favorite settings and options.
Get it just the way you like it, then you can save it and access that
custom tool anytime you like, right from the menu bar (or from the
Tool Presets floating palette). For example, let's say that you often
use the Airbrush tool, with Pantone 287 as your color, with the opacity
set to 15%, with a soft-edged 35 pixel brush tip, and the Blend mode
set to lighten. Now, you can be one click away from a brush with those
exact settings
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The
Workspace feature is another time saver. You can organize your palettes
the way you like them and save the Workspace. Then if you move some
palettes for a project, it only takes going back to the Workspace
window to move all the palettes the way you saved them originally.
Very cool!
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Photoshop
7 ships with loads of useful custom shapes, including animals, arrows,
banners, frames, music, nature, ornaments, symbols, talk bubbles and
tiles. It also shapes with many new pattern presets and brush presets.
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A
new Relative command in the Canvas Size dialog takes the math out
of resizing your canvas area.
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A
new pop-up list in the New Document dialog offers a list of commonly
used document sizes, such at letter size or 640 x 480 pixels.
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Improved
Rollovers in ImageReady are improved and more automatically created.
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There
is one click background transparency from within "Save for Web"
The features of Photoshop
7 make it another must have upgrade from Adobe. A few of the new features
mentioned above just blows you away on just how creative the engineers
of Photoshop are.
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