Photoshop CS3 has the makings of an upgrade winner
I spent some time at Adobe Systems (ADBE) headquarters last week, and got a chance to chat with engineers in the Advanced Technology Group who worked on features in Photoshop CS3, which is due in about three weeks.
A beta version of Photoshop CS3 has been available for download since December, and Adobe has done quite a few demos of the technology. But it was nice to sit at a laptop with the engineers beside me and ask some questions. One of the main things I wanted to see was whether there are killer features in this release of Photoshop that might drive sales of Adobe's entire Creative Suite, which includes Illustrator, InDesign for page layout, Dreamweaver for Web design, and other programs.
Photoshop is particularly important to the overall creative suite because so many different types of creative professionals use it heavily – everyone from professional photographers to Web designers. For my money, if any single feature is going to compel the creative community to upgrade to CS3, it's going to be a Photoshop feature.
I think Photoshop CS3 has such a feature – or rather a combination of them. They're called Quick Select and Refine Edge. Lest you fall asleep while I explain, I've recruited some adorable puppies to demonstrate. (Actually Gregg Wilensky of the Advanced Technology Group sent the screen shots. Thanks, Gregg.)
Below, we have a photo of two brown puppies standing on a fuzzy white rug, in front of a gray textured background. Our goal is to create a cutout of the puppies so we can place them in a new environment.
This will be tough for several reasons. One, the puppies are fluffy. It's easier to cut out objects that have straight edges rather than fluffy ones. Two, there are two puppies. Three, the background has two different textures.
Now, back to the puppies. A new tool, Quick Select, has allowed us to quickly grab just the puppies from the image. If you're not a heavy Photoshop user, you'll have to trust me when I tell you this would have been a pain in the butt using earlier versions of Photoshop. It would involve selecting backgrounds, inverting the selection, eliminating chunks of the image piece by piece – not a pretty process. The new Quick Select tool makes it relatively painless. Your average, intermediate Photoshop user might have taken 20 or 30 minutes working on this in previous versions. With CS3 it can be done in a couple of minutes.
Now that we've got both puppies selected, let's zoom in on the ear of the little guy on the right. By zooming in and masking the background, we can get a clear look at the true shape of our selection. As you can see, it's more lumpy than fluffy. That's a problem, because lumpy puppies are not nearly as appealing as fluffy ones.
Which brings us to the Refine Edge tool. Using it, CS3 users will be able to quickly tweak settings and rediscover textures like, say, fluffiness. Again, this is a major time saver. easily a half hour or more, depending on the size of the job.
So I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a strong upgrade cycle for CS3. The Quick Select/Refine Edge combination is something many Web designers and just about every professional photographer I know would use heavily, and the time savings makes a pretty compelling case for the purchase.
Oh, and a last look at those puppies on a new background:
Works like a charm? That's the problem with the computer industry-consumer interface: so many of us want to be charmed out of our critical faculties by some wizardly application whose clumsy limitations are just an upgrade away from exposure. When the previous version came out, everyone was "charmed" too, I'll wager, never mind the myriad "pains in the butts" that are now so obvious. This still looks crude to me. Wake me up when computers can scan the image, select the contiguous hues of the puppies, delete the background and reinsert into any new background- all with one or two clicks. Until then, yawn…
Hey Jon,
Thanks for the reply! I actually agree with you as the software will be a selling point for those purchasing the new Mac Pro, but there are also people like myself with a MacBook Pro (Core Duo machines already out there) that is just waiting for this release. The beta has performed very well and looks to be close to completion. I have been picking up ADBE here and there over the past couple years and will be watching it very closely in the near term.
Other than the much needed interface upgrade, this is by far my most favorite thing in CS3 beta! Works like a charm.
George,
You have a point – but I'd argue that's just as important for Apple as it is for Adobe. (Maybe more important.) Apple execs have been saying for months that they expect CS3 to fuel professional adoption of Mac Pros (which have Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors).
So I expect software to drive hardware purchases more than the other way around. The open question is whether professional customers will find the feature set in CS3 compelling enough to shell out the cash – and considering the broad appeal of Quick Select and Refine Edge, I'd say there's a strong case.
I think the more important point of this upgrade is that it will run natively on Intel's newer Core Duo processors. This is a major selling point for Mac users as CS2 was only able to run with emulation through Rosetta, which in turn causes a major performance hit. Given that the digital design industry is heavily saturated with Mac users, I believe there will be a great number of them that will be willing to fork over the extra cash for this upgrade.
These are great features and I'm happy to see a little article that points them out. It certainly will save me time. I've been using PS7 for a while and I just bought a Mac Pro. I can' wait for the release.