Total domination. That’s what Adobe has long enjoyed with Photoshop, the market-crushing Godzilla of image-editing applications. Not only does every serious digital artist swear by it, it’s the one pivotal application whose continued existence on the Mac is a life-or-death matter for Apple.
Unfortunately, unchallenged superiority can lead to complacency or even loss of direction, as Photoshop users discovered in the last upgrade. For all its good features (the Actions palette, for example), Photoshop 4 imposed bizarre changes that forced you to relearn important operations with no compensatory gain in productivity. Meanwhile, long-term weaknesses in the program went unaddressed.
We’re glad to report that Adobe is back on track with the new upgrade. Photoshop 5.0 finally conquers two major shortcomings users have kvetched about for years: the awkward, limited text tool and the lack of multiple undos. Also included are a number of improvements that make this the most significant Photoshop upgrade since version 3 — and incidentally, cut the legs out from under the existing Photoshop plug-ins market.
For example, Photoshop 5.0’s great new type tool basically puts Extensis’s PhotoTools plug-in out of business. All the complex type editing and formatting you used to do with PhotoTools, or by laborious selection work in Photoshop, you now can do with speed, power, and flexibility on the new type layer. This special layer (created when you choose the type tool from the tools palette and click anywhere in your document) tracks type and formatting info and lets you make changes to any aspect of type at any time — just double-click on the type to edit it.
At last, Photoshop includes professional-level type handling. You have full control of tracking, kerning, leading, and baseline control, just as in Illustrator or PageMaker. You can play with unlimited fonts and styles in a layer, too. While you still have to enter and edit type in a dialog box (which is now a floater, not a modal dialog) instead of directly into your document, the document’s type layer does show a preview of what’s in the box. Moreover, you can reposition or apply effects such as drop shadows to the type layer in the document while the Type floater is open. When you edit the type, the effects update to reflect your edits.
The other major innovation in version 5.0 is the History palette. This industrial-strength approach to multiple undos provides almost unlimited options when you change your mind. It is by far the best implementation of the basic undo function that we’ve seen. Each operation you perform — from selection moving to brush strokes to filter options — is logged into the History palette. The number of steps recorded is limited only by the amount of scratch disk space you have (or you can specify an upper limit of steps to preserve disk space).
If you want to return your image to a previous state, open the History palette and click on the relevant line. A slider lets you move interactively through each stage — a very cool feature indeed. Once you’ve moved to an earlier stage in your work, you can make any necessary modifications and continue from there. (Note that you lose all the steps that come after this point.) The History brush extends the power of the History palette, allowing you to paint earlier states of your image into selected areas. It’s like the Magic Eraser on steroids.
The addition of layers was the most important innovation in Photoshop 3. Photoshop 5.0 adds built-in layer effects that obviate the need for many third-party effects filters. From one effects box, you can control settings for drop shadows, inner shadows, outer glows, inner glows, and embossing. Once you apply them, these effects remain live, so any further work you do on the layer will display the effect, too. Moreover, you can set bevels and shadows to have the same light-source angle and color, so any changes you make to the lighting in one effect are applied globally. This will be a major time-saver for you pixel pushers doing drop shadows all day long.
Photoshop 5.0 adds new plug-ins, too. Most intriguing is the 3D Transform plug- in. This gives you the option of mapping your image on cubes, spheres, and cylinders, then moving and rotating those objects in 3D space. The idea is to allow realistic adjustments to the perspective of boxes and other geometrically simple objects in the image. Of course, this isn’t real 3D, and if you try to rotate things too far you’ll see around the back, which is just a featureless shape with no image map. It’s only a first cut at what eventually ought to be a full-fledged effort at integrating 3D into Photoshop’s 2D world. (While you’re waiting for Adobe to get around to that, try Vertigo’s Dizzy and 3D HotText plug-ins for 3D work in Photoshop.)
Automation plug-ins (located some- what anomalously in the File menu) are a new plug-in type; they basically function as file-handling wizards. For example, the Batch command Automation plug-in handles batch processing better than the batch command in Photoshop 4’s Action palette. The Contact Sheet command creates a contact sheet with thumbnails of all the images in a folder. While you can do the same things with Actions, Automation plug-ins generally work faster and provide more functionality (and, of course, you don’t have to set up the Action yourself). Third parties can design new Automation plug-ins to perform any procedure addressable through the Automation plug-in API in the Photoshop 5.0 SDK (on the Photoshop disc). Expect to see third-party suites of Automations customized for the file needs of various vertical markets.
Minor updates to the Selection and Pen tools are mostly geared to edge detection, which Photoshop previously hasn’t done well and with which it still has trouble. Trace along an edge between areas of high contrast with the new Magnetic Lasso or Magnetic Pen tool, and the selection hne or path will snap to the edge. However, the Lasso or Pen will often miss the edge when there’s little contrast or where colors are very close. Even when the contrast is high, the smoothing algorithms applied to the Lasso or path tend to make it shrink. We preferred the Magnetic Pen to the Magnetic Lasso, because it provided more editing control and better results.
You’ll also notice a host of color-handling improvements. A multiple eye-dropper lets you sample up to four color regions at once. The RGB or CMYK color info is reported in the Info palette. Color management has been beefed up with spot color channels, support for the International Color Consortium (ICC) CMS and the sRGB non-monitor color space, and a gamma control panel that other Adobe programs, including Illustrator, will share.
Now that Photoshop has eliminated its two major weaknesses, what worlds are left to conquer? The program still doesn’t import 3DMFs or any other 3D model format, though you can do that with plug-ins. The option to work on a low-res proxy of big files, speeding your work and making efficient use of hmited RAM, would be nice, too. But our vote is for a more sweeping innovation. We’d like to see Photoshop integrate the powers of the Actions and History palettes and the Automation plug-ins and go totally procedural, so that you can make any feature of the program interact modelessly with any other, perhaps via an AppleScript-compatible scripting language.
Until that high level of functionality is added, however — if it ever is — you’re bound to be happy with Photoshop 5.0.
Anzovin, Steve, Anzovin, Raf. (August 1998). Photoshop 5.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 44-46).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
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2014-04-25 / 
839007aba19b370930e91faf668c114771597828 / 
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2024-02-13 / 
aps-502.sit.bin
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
