What is Adobe Photoshop 5.5?

Adobe Photoshop 5.5 for Macintosh is the latest version able to run on System 7.6

---

Adobe Photoshop is one of the most important graphic design tools on the Macintosh. Hundreds of thousands of designers and artists use this application daily, so any update, no matter how large or small, is an important one. Photoshop 5.5 is definitely one of the larger updates, as Adobe combines two tools in one package — Photoshop 5.5 and ImageReady 2.0 — and pushes this as the best solution for designing Web graphics. Though the upgrade includes several important features not specific to the Web, the biggest changes are in Web design workflow.

When Adobe first introduced ImageReady, Web graphic artists had to first create the graphics in Photoshop, then save the file in pieces, then go through the pieces in ImageReady to optimize them for the Web. ImageReady itself was great as a compression tool, but it was essentially a crippled version of Photoshop in every other respect, so users pretty much had to work in both programs to get the best-looking Web graphics. This workflow has essentially remained the same, but Adobe has improved the integration between Photoshop and ImageReady, making it easier to move graphics back and forth, and has beefed up ImageReady considerably, making it a useful tool in its own right.

New to version 5.5 of Photoshop are several masking tools, support for Adobe’s PDF 1.3, some automation functions, and Web-specific features like Save For Web and gamma previews. If you’re not a Web designer, the masking tools will be the reason for upgrading. A new Magic Eraser, Background Eraser, and Extract Image command all go a long way toward matching the masking strength of products like Extensis Mask Pro. The Magic Eraser works a lot like a combination of the magic wand tool and the eraser tool. You can either erase all the pixels in a layer that are similar in value to the one you first click on, or erase similar contiguous pixels. The Background Eraser works much the same way, but only erases similar pixels you drag the cursor over. You can use the Background Eraser two ways: Either click a color and move the Background Eraser around, erasing only that color, or move the tool around and erase colors similar to the one the eraser’s precision point is over. Both the Magic Eraser and the Background Eraser make selecting and removing colors from an image much easier than it used to be, especially on images with a fair amount of contrast between foreground and background.

The Extract Image command brings up a palette designed to make clipping easier. You can highlight an object’s edges, define the interior, adjust some settings, and extract the background. It sounds simple, but learning to use the tool effectively is actually quite difficult. The precise settings for complex, wispy images against complex backgrounds are nearly as difficult to achieve as cutting out the image by hand. Extracting backgrounds from images with fairly matte backgrounds is significantly easier, but there is still a learning curve.

Fortunately, the Extract Image palette allows you to preview and continue to adjust your settings until you get it right. Both the Extract Image command and the Background Eraser will remove the halo that usually surrounds a clipped image.

The automation functions are a nice addition, but not significant. Version 5.5 now lets you instantiy create contact sheets or Web galleries of images you’ve worked on. The contact sheet automation feature extracts thumbnails from every image in a folder. The Web gallery actually exports Web pages with thumbnails on an index page and creates individual pages for each image, with built-in navigation.

Most of the Web-related improvements are in ImageReady, but Photoshop received some tweaking in this department as well. Choosing the new Save For Web menu command opens a preview and compression setting window that allows you to view the effects of compression on an image and set up a two- or four-image comparison so you can decide which setting is best. Three additional preview options simplify cross-platform development: Macintosh RGB, Uncompensated RGB, and Windows RGB. With these options, judging the proper gamma of an image is significantly easier.

The only other big change in Photoshop is the way it works with ImageReady. Now, if you have an image open in either application, a click on the toggle button at the bottom of the toolbar moves the image and the user from one application to the other. Layers, histories, and effects can all transition between applications, creating a relatively seamless workflow of building graphics in Photoshop and optimizing them for the Web in ImageReady. Of course, the drawback is that RAM requirements have essentially doubled.

While Photoshop received only minor improvements, ImageReady has gotten an overhaul, adding new slicing tools, JavaScript and HTML generation, an improved compression preview, layer effects, improved type control, and a nearly full suite of editing tools, including the much-needed Crop tool and the new Magic Eraser.

Aside from tighter integration with Photoshop, the two features that Web graphic designers are going to use most are the compression previews and the new slicing tools. The compression preview is actually the main ImageReady window and works the same way as the new Save For Web command in Photoshop. You can choose to display the original image, an optimized version, a side-by-side comparison of the original and an optimized version, or a four-up comparison with the original and three different optimized versions.

The slicing tools are vastly improved over what was previously available. You can now use guides set in Photoshop or ImageReady to define and chop up different areas of the graphic to make individual Web graphics. Each one of these areas can have a unique compression setting as well, allowing you to use JPEG compression on photographic elements in an interface and GIF compression in areas with solid colors. If the guides don’t provide enough flexibility, a new Slice menu and Slicing tool give you plenty of options to define specific areas to cut out. Saving your optimized graphics cuts out every piece of your sliced layout automatically and generates an HTML document that reassembles the images in a table. If you change the slicing of an image later, you can even update the HTML file. You can also name each of the images in your sliced document, making it easier to track the different elements in a layout.

In conjunction with the slicing tools, ImageReady now has some pretty impressive JavaScript functionality. Rollovers are the most common form of JavaScript in Web sites, and ImageReady handles them perfectly. You can make an image respond to mouse movement or a click by simply changing a layer’s visibility or adtog layer effects. In addition to primary rollovers, you can set secondary rollovers that change or highlight a part of a layout rather than the graphic the mouse is moving over.

The Photoshop 5.5 package clearly targets Web graphic designers. Though this upgrade didn’t include some of the features users have been begging for since version 4, such as hierarchical layers, if you do Web work, version 5.5 is a huge improvement, and even print designers will find enough to warrant upgrading.

Sanchez, Rick. (November 1999). Photoshop 5.5. MacAddict. (pgs. 58-59).

Download Adobe Photoshop 5.5 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.6 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC

Mac OS 7.6 - Mac OS 9.2.2

At least 24MB of free RAM

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver