Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Review

Here at PCstats.com, reviewing hot new computer hardware on a day to day basis means that we do a lot of image editing, graphics creation, and simple image manipulation (usually to fix up product shots in a review). We probably rack up about as many digital photos each week as a professional photographer would throughout the course of his or her work week. Given that we take anywhere from 5 to 25 shots of all products on the PCstats review block, time is of the essence to get those images sorted, cropped, and edited down to the final few which make the grade. Time is money, and to get all this work done quickly and well, we have been using Adobe's Photoshop software for some time now.

With the recent release of Adobe Photoshop version 7.0, we were interested to see if Adobe had added anything that would actually make our work faster. Photoshop is a tool, and while the eye candy is nice, the faster one can get the routine work out of the way, the more time there is to be creative. Call us practical, but if a business is investing $600USD on software ($150USD for the upgrade), it better enable the user to get things done better and more quickly. We're happy to say that Photoshop 7.0 gets this done, at least for us.

Most of the images you see on PCstats are product shots are taken in an office with overhead incandescent and florescent lighting. Depending on the time of day and the weather outside, there is also a mix of natural light to contend with. Also, PCstats routinely attends conferences and trade shows where the lighting conditions change constantly from one booth to the next. These conditions can make creating consistent digital imagery for the internet pretty difficult, as adjusting light levels and colour balance can become tedious.

In the past, this used to mean spending a few hours each day doing image editing with Photoshop 5.5. I've been using Photoshop in one form or another for quite some time now, and have always found it to be the best software platform for this kind of work, and for any kind of web-based site design.

No matter how good Adobe Photoshop 5.5 was, there were always tasks that took a long time to complete, especially the aforementioned adjusting of light levels and the colour cast of images. With the volume of product shots that we work with, doing these adjustments manually wasn't a great solution, but the only option. This is where Photoshop 7 stood out for us, as one of its new features cut our image editing times dramatically!

The transition from version 5.5 to version 7 took only a day or so, mainly because each software build is an extension on the previous. The controls are largely in the same location, and the menus, icons, and features are highly intuitive - perfect for a hectic environment like online publication where time is scarce and the work week long.

New features of Adobe Photoshop 7.0

This latest version of Adobe's most well known product introduces several new features. To be precise, there are eleven new enhancements. We'll touch upon all of these, but the ones of most interest are; Auto Colour, the new 'Healing Brush' tool, a Pattern Maker, the introduction of an embedded File Browser and a workspace option.

Of these, The healing brush is the most revolutionary feature and the auto colour feature is practically a godsend to digital photographers, so these are the two features we'll cover first.

Long time users of the Photoshop series will be relieved (and unsurprised) to hear that there have been no major changes to the interface this time around. Anyone familiar with recent versions of Photoshop will feel right at home in this new version. In fact, the first change that you will probably notice (other than the new opening graphic) is the new graphical file browser. First though, we're going to take a look at the 'Auto Colour' option.