With its sophisticated color-editing and image-enhancement controls, Adobe Photoshop 2.0 is an image-processing package that can hold its own against dedicated prepress systems. The new version features on-screen CMYK editing, a feature unavailable in any other package, either for the Mac or for the PC. Moreover, Photoshop's beefed-up functionality, learned with a well-designed, efficient interface, gives it a decided edge over Letraset's ColorStudio 1.1.
No More Risky Conversions
Photoshop 2.0's enhanced prepress capabilities make it faster and easier than ever for you to achieve professional resu1ts. For color-separation work, version 2.0 lets you work directly in CMYK display mode, so you can view and edit high-resolution CMYK color scans on-screen without the time-consuming and risky process of converting them to RGB. This new feature vastly improves screen-to-output fidelity, making Photoshop’s results far more predictable than those of ColorStudio for color separation. A separate 24-bit-color window displays changes made to any individual channel.
Vastly improved controls for screen- and output-color calibration also boost Photoshop's appeal for prepress operations. The program has separate UCR (Undercolor Removal) and GCR (Gray Component Replacement) controls and provides full support for output devices that use Level 2 of Adobe's PostScript language, which greatly improves print quality and minimizes moire patterns with color separations. In addition, Knoll Software's Gamma control panel is bundled with the new version.
The Curves dialog box lets you make extremely precise color-correction modifications, and the Levels dialog box contains new tools for automatic selection of optimum color and brightness values for an image. Version 2.0 features a new info window that acts as a densitometer, displaying CMYK and RGB values for any pixel in an image. This window also provides feedback on such aspects as length and angle of lines as you use different tools, a feature that comes in handy if you have to repeat actions. All in all, these improvements essentially eliminate the prepress advantages of ColorStudio over Photoshop.
Photoshop 2.0 opens and rasterizes EPS images at any resolution, complete with anti-aliasing and font and color support, so you can easily incorporate Adobe Illustrator-compatible files into your continuous-tone images. The program imports images on a floating layer and places them with anti-aliased edges.
The horizontal and vertical scales of incoming EPS images are also adjustable. The only drawback is that custom PostScript fill patterns can't be rasterized, Although Photoshop 2.0's EPS rasterization doesn't offer the fu11 feature set of ColorStudio's Shapes Annex, it is integrated into the program. Shapes Annex, on the other hand, is a separate package. Furthermore, Photoshop’s rasterization handles complex EPS images that usually choke Shapes Annex.
Photoshop 2.0 now supports duotones — as well as the monotones, tritones, and quadtones supported by previous versions of Photoshop — in a separate display mode. You can specify color and specific brightness ranges with the program's new Pantone color picker, and Photoshop separates each ink color into its own output plate when it prints an image. The Pantone color picker, which is based on the Radius Pantone Color Toolkit, maps any color to its closest Pantone equivalent.
For improved precision, a new Bezier pen tool creates irregular selections, much as Adobe Illustrator's pen tool does. You can select regions to be made into alpha channels or masks, and it’s easy to take any selected area (such as a region grabbed with the magic-wand tool) and automatically turn it into a pen path. You can also save these paths as EPS clipping paths for use as masks in Illustrator.
Photoshop 2.0's System 7 support is just short of superb. The program supports 32-bit addressing, which lets it lake full advantage of large chunks of RAM for dramatic screen-redraw performance and minimal disk thrashing, TrueType fonts are fully anti-aliased, and Photoshop supports core Apple events and the Publish function. Missing, however, is support for balloon help.
Everything Old Is New Again
In addition to Photoshop's completely new features, the program has several small but important enhancements of the standard Photoshop tool functions. For example, you can now set the eyedropper tool to pick up the average color of an area (either 3-x-3- or 5-x-5-pixel matrices) rather than the exact color of individual pixels, which is extremely useful for dealing with scanned images that don't have uniform color regions.
Another handy improvement lets you set the program to alert you with a beep when a processing function has finished. And the Fuzziness parameter in the magic-wand and paint-bucket tools has been replaced by the more powerful Antialiased check box, which automatically determines the optimum values for anti-aliased edges. Perhaps one of the handiest Photoshop 2.0 improvements lets you specify a virtual-memory disk and make it independent of the disk on which your Photoshop Preferences folder is stored. If you run out of disk space when working with large color images, this approach makes it easy to redirect your virtual-memory drive without having to move your Preferences folder.
Mac animators will appreciate Photoshop 2.0's ability to convert RGB images into indexed color images. You can dither images to a predefined color palette imported from other painting programs or to an exact number of colors, a key feature when working with programs such as MicroMind Director or Paracomp's FilmMaker.
Photoshop's PICT Resource module lets you open PICS animation files (or any other type of document or application), extract the PICT resources (or PICS frames), and import them into Photoshop for processing. Unfortunately, there is no module for exporting PICT resources, so you have to recompile processed PICTS into a PICS file by using an external application.
Photoshop 2.0's filters are sorted into groups to speed up the process of location and selection, and there is a multitude of new special effects. The Pointillize filter turns any scan into a Seurat painting. The Crystallize filter creates a stained-glass effect. Wind adds three different directional streaks, and Tiles shatters an image into a definable number of panes with controlable offsets. In addition, you can now apply the Spherize effect either horizontally or vertically,
Videophiles will appreciate Photoshop's NTSC Legal and De-Interlace filters. These come in handy for automatic adjustment of harsh saturation and for cleaning images grabbed from video sources. You can use the Displace filter to automatically apply Impressionist filters to an image as well as to create a multitude of other effects. In essence, the Displace filter shifts pixels in one image based on the brightness values of another image.
The Bottom Line
With version 2.0, Adobe has added more power and precision to the Mac's most popular image-processing package. Direct CMYK editing and more-powerful color-calibration and image-enhancement controls make the package an indispensable tool for prepress work.
Moreover, Photoshop 2.0's new functions are cleanly integrated with the standard Photoshop interface, so users already familiar with the package don't have to make major readjustments to take advantage of the upgrade. If you already depend on Photoshop for your image-processing work, you'll clearly benefit from upgrading to version 2.0. No professional graphic artist should be without it.
Biedny, David. (September 1991). Adobe Photoshop. MacUser. (pgs. 50-51).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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ps201.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
