Cons: Expensive; some tools have a long learning curve
The Bottom Line: Photoshop is what professionals use to manipulate images, with good reason. It is a powerful, stable and often fun-to-use image processing application.
pvreditor's Full Review: Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Full Version for PC (23101604)
I bought my first digital camera in 1999 and quickly became a digital photo addict. By removing the cost of film processing, pictures taken with a digital camera become less expensive the more pictures you take... and I've taken hundreds of thousands. In fact, I've probably had more than 400 digital photographs published, mostly in the magazine that employs me as an editor but a few elsewhere.
The only software I will use to process digital photos -- both those that I take and those that I receive from other authors -- is Adobe Photoshop. The version of Photoshop that I now use at home and work is Photoshop 7.
Facts and Features
Photoshop 7 was released in 2003 as the latest version in the venerable Photoshop series. Another version was released not long after, called Photoshop CS (for "Creative Suite"). As far as I can tell, there are few differences between Photoshop 7 and Photoshop CS in terms of capability and ergonomics, except that CS is supposed to be easier to use with other Adobe applications such as Premier and Acrobat. Photoshop CS does have some advancements in image matching and histograms that would be nice to have, but I have yet to plumb the full depths of what Photoshop 7 has to offer.
Photoshop 7 is a big and expensive program, and it requires a powerful computer to run it. I just did a quick Web search and found many companies selling Photoshop 7, most for more than $500. There is a terrific discount given to students and educators that make the program much more affordable; take advantage of that if it is a possibility.
Photoshop 7 will open and manipulate virtually every image format, a couple of which are proprietary to Adobe. Some of the image file types that Photoshop will open are bitmap (BMP), JPEG, PSD, TIFF, PDF, RAW, EPS, PCX and PNG. In addition, the full version of Photoshop (which includes both CS and Version 7) is one of the few imaging applications that can handle CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) image formats, something that's critical for my work in the publishing industry. Prior to getting Photoshop 7, I had no means to open PSD, EPS, TIFF and JPEG files that were saved as CMYK images. With Photoshop 7, I can open and manipulate these files with ease.
Speaking of manipulation, Photoshop 7 lets you manipulate virtually everything in an image, including its brightness, contrast, color saturation, color shading, sharpness, blur, resolution and file type. The software has incredible layering capability that lets you leave your main (background) image intact while you create layers to modify the image. There are also quick and easy-to-use tools for blur, sharpening, cropping, adding text, highlighting, and my favorite, the rubber stamp. A nifty "healing brush" tool can zap a zit off a chin in the blink of an eye, leaving only smooth skin behind. A few clicks and a swipe with the paintbrush tool can whiten teeth enough to make your dentist jealous.
I could do many of these things with other imaging software, but none was as easy or as elegant as Photoshop 7.
Computer Information
The slowest computer that I dare to run Photoshop 7 on has a 533 MHz AMD (not Athlon) processor with 192 MB RAM and an 8 MB shared video memory. This computer runs Windows 98SE. Photoshop will run on this computer but it is slow, and I do not dare to open more than two images at once.
My office computer is a 667 MHz Pentium III with 512 MB RAM running Win 98SE, and Photoshop runs a little faster. Next, I have it on a 700 MHz Athlon computer with 768 MB RAM and Windows XP Home, and Photoshop runs very nicely. This computer has a 64 MB video card and I can easily open six images at once with good response. Performing image effects is fairly quick and there are never any mysterious slowdowns.
Finally, I have two much faster computers -- a laptop and a desktop with 2.8 MHz Pentium IV processors -- that run Photoshop 7 faster still. These computers both have 1 GB RAM, 128 MB video cards and run Win XP Home, and I can open 10 images at once with no apparent slowdown.
(The images I refer to were taken by my eight megapixel Konica Minolta A2 camera. I think the pixel count is something like 3,226 x 2,448 pixels, so these are big pictures.)
Even still, performing some effects on the biggest images takes time, as much as 15 seconds or so to convert an image into a believable-looking watercolor version. Common effects, such as sharpening, are nearly immediate on my fastest computers. Faster computers with even more capable display cards will make the Photoshop experience even better.
Common Uses
As I said, I primarily use Photoshop to process digital images. I have my camera set to save images as high-resolution JPEGs and most of the images I get at my work are JPEGs. With Photoshop 7, it's easy to open and manipulate these pictures.
The tools I use most often are crop, adjust, rubber stamp, blur, dodge and the selection tools. Cropping couldn't be easier than it is in Photoshop 7, and the same tool works brilliantly to straighten images. Simply click and drag across an image to create a crop box, which you can then adjust on each side by clicking and dragging to where you want it. If you need to straighten the image, move the cursor out of the box, click and drag from side to side. Once you have it set where you want it (and it's easier to do than it is to explain!), just hit the "enter" key for one-stop cropping and straightening.
The rubber stamp tool is among the most magical things in Photoshop and I frequently use it. With it, you can cover up defects in the picture by grabbing something nearby and "rubber stamping" it over the defect. For example, I've used it to remove telephone poles from landscapes, bags from under eyes and (just last night) chips in the finish of my car. The first time you see it used is eye-popping.
Most pictures do not have perfect exposure and this can be somewhat corrected with Photoshop's elaborate adjustment tools. Go up to "View" on the menu bar and click on "Adjustments," then on "Levels." This brings up a histogram of the image with three sliders underneath. Moving the right slider to the left makes the bright parts of the image brighter, and moving the left slider to the right makes the dark parts of the image darker. The middle slider adjusts the brightness of those parts of the image that are neither white nor black. This is a tool I use a lot, although it cannot compensate for a badly exposed image. It can take a picture that's almost perfect and make it perfect, in just a few clicks.
There are a few ways to do blur in Photoshop 7 but the "blur" tool is a quick method that I use frequently. With the blur tool, I click the mouse and scrub away in the background to soften detail and highlight whatever is in the foreground. It's quick and easy, and results are seen immediately.
Another favorite tool is the "dodge" tool -- as long as you don't ask me why it's called "dodge." This lets me quickly brighten certain areas of the image, such as the face of a person that is in shadow. It's easy to overdo it but it is terrific when I need just a little more brightness to better highlight the subject. Its counterpart is the "burn" tool, which darkens things. I use it to darken skylines and mountains that are washed out by haze.
The final favorite tool I'll mention is the selection tool. I use this to encircle a specific area on the screen, then perform adjustments to only that area. For example, I have taken pictures with TV images in them. If the TV image is washed out, I use the selection tool to highlight the image and then adjust its brightness and contrast to make it look more natural. Since I work for a magazine that gets read by broadcasters, this is a common adjustment.
There are many other tools and little features in Photoshop 7 that make it so usable and capable. For example, adjusting the size of brushes is a simple matter of pressing the "[" and "]" keys on my computer's keyboard. Zooming in and out is done by holding down "control" and pressing either "+" or "-". Adjusting a building that looks crooked due to an excessive wide-angle lens is a surprisingly quick fix, and tweaking colors in images is simple and tactile. (I just did quite a bit of this last night!)
Sharpening an image, using Photoshop's curiously named "Unsharp Mask," is easy, fast and very effective.
Summary
I had a variety of image problems at my work, including file formats that I couldn't open and tweaks that I couldn't perform. Photoshop 7 knocked those problems out of the sky. It simply opens EVERY image format that I've thrown at it, including hard-to-open CMYK images. This alone makes it invaluable for my work.
It has been rock stable for me as well. I can not recall a time that Photoshop 7 has crashed and this is an application that I use every day. I use it in both Win 98SE and Win XP Home, and it works well with both.
Photoshop 7 also has a very convenient browsing feature that makes it easy to find, open and delete images. Better browsing is supposed to be one of the features of Photoshop CS but I'm not sure how it could be any better than Photoshop 7.
Finally, the ability of Photoshop 7 to adjust, tweak, manipulate and save images is so complete that it is simply the only application I will use to process pictures. It is not cheap and it does have a significant learning curve, but there is no other software that inspires my loyalty like Photoshop 7. This software does everything I need it to do -- and more -- and it is reliable, elegant and extremely capable for processing digital images.
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