Adobe Photoshop 7.0 - It's All Good - Page 3

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Turn Your Creativity Loose
New tools to make your job easier and better ways to manage your projects are great, but when it comes down to it, Photoshop is all about creativity. Here are a couple of the new features you'll find that allow you to exercise your creative self more easily.

Create new paintbrushes
With new options for customizing and creating paintbrushes, Adobe is hoping you'll put away your specialized painting applications and use Photoshop exclusively. We don't think it will put the others out of business, but it could well take some of their sales.

To control the look of your brushes, open the Brush palette from the Window pulldown menu, if it isn't already open. You'll get a visual list of brushes on the right-hand side, with various shape and color controls on the left. Click on the name of one of the controls (like "Shape Dynamics" or "Scattering") and the list of brushes will be replaced by controls for that attribute. For example, the Shape Dynamics controls let you set the Jitter and Minimum diameter of the brush, among other things.

Most changes will preview instantly in the window in the bottom of the brush palette, so you'll know just what you're getting. You can even make custom-shape brushes. When you have a well-defined image open in Photoshop, select Edit/Define Brush and you've instantly got a new brush in that shape.

• Figure 2. The Brush Palette in Photoshop 7.0 not only gives you new options for changing the look of your brushes, but displays an output sample below, so you know what you're getting.
  

  Click here for a hi-res image

Create patterns
We may not have saved the best for last, but we have saved the most fun for last. Photoshop 7.0 can instantly make customizable patterns out of any image, giving you a simple way to create textures or odd effects-or even gift wrap.

Start with the image you want to use, then select Filter/Pattern Maker. You'll get a new workspace with your original image in the center. Highlight the portion of the image you want to use in the pattern and press the Generate button to the right. You'll get a random pattern made from your selection, tiled to cover the whole canvas. If you don't like the result, simply generate again. Pattern Maker can hold 20 patterns in its history, so you can always go back. Play around with the controls; you'll find that you can control the size and layout of the pattern tiles.

When you've made something you like, click the disc icon on the lower right to save your pattern as a pattern preset.

• Figure 3. With the new Pattern Maker, you can isolate any section of an image and use it to make a tiled, repeating pattern.
  

  Click here for a hi-res image

It's All Good
Although this has been just a quick look at some of Photoshop's new features, as you can see Adobe have put considerable thought into the new features they have added. In some ways it is hard to improve what is already regarded as one of the most complete graphics creation and editing applications available, but they appear to have done just that.

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