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An indepth look at Adobe Photoshop CS3

Posted on Friday, January 5th, 2007 under web design news by Dustin Brewer.

It looks like Adobe CS3 is just around the corner and we are getting small glimpses of what is to come out of this software. According to reports the full version of the software is to be due out in Spring of this year. Although you must go out of your way apparently to sign up for the beta or regress to only getting 30 days out of the beta software. This is all in part to piracy and serial mix up for some legitimate users of Adobe CS3. Don’t worry though, Adobe has a CS3 serial generator that can help the misfortunate people that got left out in the cold.It looks like do to some piracy concerns from Adobe they have removed some 3,000 software license combinations from being included in the beta test without getting direct permission from Adobe to use the beta. It seems that you have to go to Adobe CS3 serial generator to receive a serial that will work with CS3. Apparently the piracy concerns stems from a serial generator that used an algorithm that only included some 3,000 software license combinations.

For those of you out there that are in to that scene don’t bother trying to make a generator for the CS3 beta because it is Internet activation only. Using the Adobe CS3 serial generator they should email you a new serial that will be able to be used in the CS3 beta within a few days and you should be on your way to enjoying the new layout of the software. Which I will go in to shortly. For those of you that haven’t heard about the CS3 beta test you can visit adobe labs and download it for free.

Now to the meat of the new software, first off it has an awesome new interface. Making space in Adobe Photoshop CS2 has always been an issue, even with dual monitors there isn’t quite enough room to maneuver everything. CS3 changes that by making the toolbar smaller with all of the same tools and even making the pallet windows contract to add more space.

Aside from making more space there are other new features that are added. The first one is the Quick Select tool which is just amazing, it is like a brush meets select similar. You just wipe your cursor across the similar areas that would like to select and it selects them for you. You can also simply click one one area and another area that have similar colors and it will select all the areas that are related to those two places. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to mess around with it but so far it looks like it is going to be the next magic wand.

There is also Refine Edges that allows you to distort and change how the selection effects the image in amazing ways. It is something that you have to mess around with to really understand what I mean. I will of course try anyway to explain it, basically if you make a selection… any selection using any selection tool. You can then go in with Refine Edges and change the contrast or radius as well as make the selection smoother. You can also expand the selection and feather it. It also gives you the ability to preview the selection in various different ways to see exactly what you have selected in a better manner.

In the new version there are also some changes to camera raw that allow you to use camera raw on tiff’s and jpeg’s as well as the raw camera images. This can add some very interested effects to images for photographers and designers alike.

Also they have added a histogram to the curves color adjustment tool so that you can have a better visual representation of what you are changing and what needs to be changed. There are also some minor other options they have added to tweak and adjust the way the you use the tool. But the histogram is the biggest improvement to an already perfect tool for adjusting color.

CS3 also now makes all filters into adjustment layers that can be changed and/or removed at any time during the creation of a project. This is a huge help because previously making a filter change and then finding out several changes later that it would have been better without the adjustment is sometimes difficult to fix. Now that all filters are added as adjustment layers you can better tweak and adjust (pardon the pun) your image to perfection. There is now also a black and white conversion tool that is an adjustment layer. The new tool perfects the art of changing images or even a single layer to black and white.
There is now also a new auto align feature that can help to align various images together if you are creating a collage or a panoramic view of a city or landscape. They have also added a very similar feature called auto blend that can automatically blend colors into each other seamlessly if done correctly. This can add an all new level of design to our creations. Especially for those of us in to the Web 2.0 design style.

Overall the new version of Photoshop is definitely going to be a hit amongst designers, the new layout is awesome and the new tools that are being added are top notch and don’t take away from the overall use of the software. I for for one cannot wait to see the full version. The only thing that I have to complain about the software so far is the icons. For both the programs icon and the PSD icons it seems to me that they could have done a lot better to design the icons. Hopefully this is just a beta icon scheme and when the full version comes out they will go all out to make the icons look nice.

One Response to “An indepth look at Adobe Photoshop CS3”

1. Daniel B. Honigman says:

   January 5, 2007 at 9:08 pm

   Right on. I got my hands on a copy of the CS3 Photoshop beta and it looks
   awesome. Can’t wait to see the rest of the CS3 suite of programs.

   Keep
   it up.
   -Daniel

   Reply