Adobe Photoshop 7.0 - It's All Good

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It's almost a holiday for Web designers, the day a new version of Adobe Photoshop comes out. Long the default graphics-creation application, Photoshop has stayed ahead of competing apps by meeting the changing needs of designers and never settling for good enough. The new version, 7.0, provides some jaw-dropping tools that should make intranet developers smile. There are tools that make formerly complex operations remarkably simple, make organizing resources and working in teams easier, and let users test their creativity in new ways.

In the following article, we'll point out some of the features that we think will interest intranet professionals. Also, look out for our upcoming article Photoshop 7.0 - The Pro's Perspective, in which intranet professionals tell us what they like and dislike about the new version. For now, though, we'll get acquainted with some of the new feature and improvements in Adobe's latest offering.

Great Results in a Flash
The new features in Photoshop are all about making your life easier and your work time more productive. Here are some of the tools that Adobe have added and enhanced to make your day a little easier.

Healing Brush and Patch Tools
While Photoshop 7.0 has scores of improvements, the one that it will be best known for most certainly the Healing Brush. Found in the toolbox (marked with a slightly cutesy icon showing an adhesive bandage), the Healing Brush seems to be reading your mind, the way it seamlessly removes blemishes from photos in one easy step.

Imagine that you need to post an image of your boss on your intranet, but you know he'll hate the picture, because his face is full of blemishes and shiny patches. To fix them, open the photo in Photoshop and select the Healing Brush. Place the curser on a different part of your boss's face, one that's free of blemishes and has the correct texture, then option-click or alt-click that spot. Immediately after that, click on the problem area you're trying to correct. Photoshop will swap the area you first clicked with the problem area, then adjust the color, so that it perfectly blends in with the surrounding area. What formerly was a painstaking operation now becomes so simple that a five-year-old could do it. In our testing, the Healing Brush produced superb, undetectable results every time.

For larger areas, you can use the Patch tool, which performs the same function as the Healing Brush, but works on large or irregularly-shaped areas. Click and hold the Healing Brush button to call up the Patch tool. When you do, a lasso icon will appear. Use it to encircle the problem area, then move the outline you've just created to an unblemished part of the photo. Instantly, the blemishes you first outlined will disappear.

Auto color
Equally as impressive is the Auto Color command, found under Image/Adjustments in the pulldown menu. Auto Color is a quick way to remove color casts throughout an image. To test it, we scanned in several old photos with heavy casts, mostly yellow, obscuring the true colors. Selecting Auto Color instantly removed the color casts, revivifying the colors and completely brightening the images. To test it out for yourself, make a duplicate of a test image and place them side-by-side. Select Auto Color for one and compare the results. A former multi-step operation becomes a snap to perform.

Spell checker
Designers-at least the designers we've met-can remember stacks of color charts, freelance illustrators' specialties, and Byzantine printer specifications, but can't correctly spell a sentence to save their lives. If this describes you, your shoor to apreciate Photoshopp's new spell-checker.

To use it, select any text layer in your project, then select Edit/Check Spelling from the pulldown menu. Photoshop will begin checking the text, and will even check text in all the layers, so that you don't need to select every layers separately. If you only want it to check one layer, though, uncheck the Check All Layers box at the bottom of the Spell Checker window.

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