Review by Beth Camaro
Photoshop 5.5 is like its predecessors, complex and not overly intuitive, so it's not for the software-shy or dilettante designer. But if you need a full-featured graphics and photo-editing tool and are willing to invest a little time learning how a powerful piece of software works, this is your baby.
Included in this version is a program called ImageReady 2.0. ImageReady has many of the basic color correction, painting and selection tools familiar to users of PHOTOSHOP, plus an amazing set of Web tools for optimizing and previewing images and creating GIF animations. You can even create rollovers and generate the HTML for it with the new PHOTOSHOP. PHOTOSHOP has been getting steadily more Web-centric, making it easier to do Web graphics prep with the tools we love.
What Are the Options?
Many tools allow you flexibility in creating your product. We review several of them for you, beginning with the "Save for Web" dialog box. This feature allows two-up and four-up previewing of images in different Web graphics file formats, and with different file attributes, to show side-by side comparisons of how graphics will look at what degree of optimization. Now the artist has a lot of control over the file size/optimized image settings. You can also save and apply named optimization settings and resize the image.
New Web features optimize images for the Web in GIF, JPEG and PNG (no pesky royalty fees to worry about with PNG!) file formats, create background transparency and background matting and preview and control dithering.
If you want to play around with the photo to create different effects, try the Magic Eraser tool, which erases solid-colored areas to transparency with a single click. The Background Eraser tool erases areas to transparency by dragging and is useful for assigning transparency to the background around hard-edged objects. Equally interesting, the Extract command extracts foreground objects from their background. This is tricky, but it works. As a sophisticated masking feature, the Extract command is designed to isolate objects with wispy or intricate edges and really does work, if you can figure out how to do it.
Another cool tool is the Art History Brush tool. It paints with stylized strokes that approximate the look of different paint styles, which is interesting, if a bit esoteric. The History Brush lets you remove pieces of your image, a stroke at a time, and is very cool to experiment with. The History Brush lets you remove pieces of your image, a stroke at a time, and opens up new creative avenues to explore.
Three new (or enhanced) commands automate the export of multiple images: Contact Sheet II places a series of images as thumbnail previews on a single page; Picture Package places multiple copies of a source image on a single page, similar to the photo packages traditionally sold by portrait studios; and Web Photo Gallery exports a collection of images as a Web site, automatically creating the required HTML files.
The Auto Contrast command lets you adjust the highlights and shadows of images automatically. This is great for retouching faded photos in a hurry and can also be used to highlight specific sections of images for emphasis without color adjustment.
The Contiguous option restricts the action of the magic wand or paintbucket tool to pixels immediately adjacent to the area clicked. Deselecting this option allows all eligible pixels in the image to be selected or filled.
New Type options in the Type tool dialog box let you apply simulated type styles, choose from various anti-aliasing methods, and better control the placement of low-resolution type.
New Indexed Color options under the Indexed Color command let you control dithering and the color table and assign background transparency. In addition, you can use the color table to assign transparency to a specified color in the image. Direct GIF support for RGB images lets you save RGB images directly in GIF format using the Save a Copy command now. It's nice not having to go through that extra step with Indexed color.
New JPEG Save options let you control the appearance of originally transparent areas, compress file sizes further, and preview the size and download time of the file when saving as JPEG. This is a wonderful tool for optimizing load time on your Web pages. This feature is worth the price of the upgrade all by itself.
Now for the Cons
The only down side to Photoshop 5.5 (aside from the obvious complexity) is that you need a real muscle machine to run it. Don't even try it on a machine with less than 128 megabytes of RAM. The extraordinary history features take up a lot of memory, and you can use up to an extra gig on your hard drive to supplement it if the space is available. PHOTOSHOP makes its own specialized swap file this way and will take an enormous amount of space to do it if you let it. There are options to limit this in the preferences section, but you'll definitely need some empty disk space or PHOTOSHOP 's performance will be noticeably impaired.
All in all, Photoshop 5.5 is a wonderful piece of artist-centric software with timely and useful Web-enabled features. We highly recommend it to anybody with a creative bent, especially if you like to learn.
Photoshop 5.5
[$549 full license, $189 upgrade at egghead]
Adobe
