Photoshop CS: The Photographer's Mecca

by Guy Lerner

December 20, 2003

Since its debut in 1990, one remarkable piece of software has been an ever-present catalyst to the development of digital imaging. Adobe’s venerable Photoshop, now in its eighth incarnation and arguably the flagship product in the company’s relaunched Creative Suite (CS), is already the undisputed standard-bearer for an industry growing from strength to strength.

Now, with digital imaging technology on the verge of breaking through as the future of professional photography, Photoshop is there again to provide the bedrock of tools the majority of professional and amateur photographers alike simply couldn’t work without.

There is certainly no shortage of competition, with companies such as Corel and Macromedia putting up their stalls within earshot of Adobe at every turn. Some of their applications – PhotoPaint, Fireworks MX, even entry-level but feature-rich software like PhotoImpact (Ulead) and PaintShop (Jasc) – are arguably better suited to some of the popular consumer uses of digital cameras and Web pages. Despite attempts by Adobe to offer different flavors of Photoshop for entry-level and intermediate markets (with Elements and PhotoShop Album), Photoshop’s critics persistently argue that even they are too big, too bulky and too complex for the average user.

As a digital photographer, and a relatively recent convert at that, my interest in Photoshop was piqued by Adobe’s comments earlier in the year that the next version was going to be aimed (at least in part) at professional photographers. You’d think this has always been the case (with a name like PHOTO-shop), but photographers use a different lingo to the graphic arts-slanted Photoshop terminology, and it was by all accounts a completely separate (and sometimes difficult) tool to learn in addition to traditional photographic conventions.

(I still believe an opportunity was missed for an entrepreneurial company to develop a similar product designed by and for photographers, but that’s another matter entirely).

Photoshop was, after all, going to include native support for digital camera raw files (this was previously offered as a separate ($99) “plugin” and didn’t support popular cameras like Canon’s 10D and Rebel/300D, among others), include popular “photographic filters” as part of its already extensive built-in filter arsenal, and incorporate some very digital photography-specific functionality (like live histograms, shadow/highlight adjustments, and my personal favourite, a genuine lens blur/depth of field filter).

In other words, Photoshop was going to become the digital darkroom in every way, allowing me to input, edit and output my photos as a part of my workflow, not in spite of it. Sure I’ve been using Photoshop since version 5 to do essentially the same thing, with the help of plugins, actions and workarounds, but suddenly the software itself had grown up and started talking my language.

So does Photoshop CS live up to its “new and exciting” billing? Has it become the “killer app” for digital photographers, indeed for all photographers? Or has the behemoth just enjoyed a shower and shave so it could parade its bulky wares under a dollied-up façade? These were the questions I set out to answer as I hastily unwrapped the box and loaded the first of five CDs in the tray. (For the record, the full Creative Suite ships with five CDs, but only the first two contain the application installers, and Photoshop is loaded from the first disc).

As a digital photographer first and foremost, however, I must concede that Photoshop CS is as close to indispensable as a software tool can be – and I haven’t even started the review proper! I’ll go further and say that the true potential of digital photography, at the present state of the art, would be seriously weakened without Photoshop CS. No photographer working professionally should be without a copy on his PC or Mac, period. It’s just that good.

But let’s backtrack a little and find out why I think it’s just that good. For starters, the new features in Photoshop CS reads like a digital photographer’s wishlist (a complete list of new features would take up a review on its own, so I’m going to focus here, pun intended, on new features for digital photographers):

• Native support for raw data – as mentioned earlier, Photoshop CS now supports raw data from most current and legacy digital cameras (the new Canons included), including small but significant enhancements like integrated file browser previews. Photoshop CS also contains one of the most detailed raw file processing interfaces available, allowing for fine tweaks to the raw data, and batch automation of multiple files.
• Enhanced file browser – the new file browser is as much a digital photo center and light box as it is a browser. You can assign metadata to individual files (based on Adobe’s XML standard), enable large and configurable previews of an image, batch-process images without opening them in Photoshop, and tag and organize images as you see fit. The fact that File Browser supports raw previews makes the process of importing and managing hundreds of raw files for postproduction simple and transparent.
• Better integration with Acrobat – I often distribute photo previews by PDF, and Photoshop CS makes the process of creating live PDF previews, complete with intelligent picture data, completely seamless.
• Web photo galleries – not a major feature on its own, but I always found Photoshop’s automated Web galleries weak and uninspiring. New photo gallery templates are far more intuitive, use creative style sheets and allow for viewer feedback, which makes them a useful, if not essential tool for the digital photographer.
• Match and replace colors – Photoshop can “read” the color from an image or layer and apply it to another. You can also use the Replace Color tool to change the color of any object without affecting its texture or lighting. Both tools can be used to apply quick and effective color changes for anything from fashion garment colors, color casts or even red-eye removal (pick a dark color and “paint out” the red eye – works a charm).
• View live histograms – this may not seem like a biggie, but Photoshop never had a live histogram feature before. You had to physically open up a static histogram window to see the effects any changes you made had on the exposure and dynamic range of the image. The live histogram window changes all that, allowing you to tweak an image and know exactly when you’ve gone over the acceptable exposure limits.
• Shadows and highlights – how often have you taken a photo of someone against a bright background, only to find them appearing as a virtual silhouette with the background perfectly exposed? With the new Shadow/Highlight adjustment tool, you can pull detail from the shadows and highlights in a photo independently, so the silhouette becomes human and the bright background can be toned down to a less imposing shade. Kudos to Adobe for such a basic yet powerful feature.
• Create realistic lens blurs – I’ve recently completed a wedding shoot where I wanted to creatively adjust depth-of-field for many of the final photos. I did so using tried and trusted selective masking and Gaussian blur techniques, and the results, although pleasing, could hardly be considered “realistic.” How I wish I had Photoshop CS’s new lens blur filter at my disposal. Using alpha masks, you can simulate the blur of various lens designs and apply them to the final image. It’s hellishly slow – as you’ll read later in the review – but it’s dead-on accurate.
• Photo filters at last – no more trying to simulate the effects of color-correction filters on color or black-and-white photos. Photoshop CS ships with a full set of photographer-savvy filters, like the common 80- and 81-series (cooling and warming) filters for balancing shady and daylight exposures, and correcting artificial lighting color casts. There are some excellent third-party filter sets that do the same thing (nik Multimedia Color Efex Pro comes to mind), but they’re not cheap. Pity the Photoshop CS set doesn’t contain any polarizing or split-density filters, but I guess you can’t have everything for free.
• Panoramas the easy way – Photoshop borrowed a feather from its younger sibling Elements and now includes the latter’s Photo Merge feature to blend multiple images into seamless panoramas. I can’t admit to having used it much yet, preferring to tinker with the more sophisticated (and freely available) Panorama Tools filters, but it’s a neat feature to have for anything but the most advanced panorama applications.

The real test for Photoshop CS, in my book anyway, will be putting these features through their paces for some of the typical photo editing work that I do on a daily basis. Only then could I tell how appropriate they are for me, and by extension for other photographers like me.

To do so in the confines of a review, I’m going to take a digital photo from its raw, unprocessed state, and develop it using as many of the new features of Photoshop CS as possible. Of course, I wouldn’t practically use ALL the features for every photo I take, and sometimes only one or two, but it will be a good exercise nonetheless to put CS through its paces.

Aside from its familial relationship with Photoshop, the plugin’s claim to fame was its speed and configurability. By all accounts (mine included) it processed raw files faster than competing products, and much faster than the raw file utilities supplied by camera vendors.

The only thing that could have made it better, in my opinion, was complete integration with Photoshop. After all, if Adobe wanted photographers to think of Photoshop as an extension of their digital workflow, what better way than to help them work with the application from start to finish, without relying on third party software.

It was widely rumoured that the plugin’s functionality would indeed be integrated with the next major release of Photoshop, and how fortunate those rumors were true. Even though there are (arguably) a handful of tools better than Photoshop for working with raw files (Phase One's Capture One DSLR for instance), the fact that I can pop my CompactFlash card in the reader and get to work on processing my files straight from Photoshop is a great time saver. (It’s also cheaper, with entry-level versions of C1 selling for upwards of $99 at the time of writing this review).

With this background in mind, my test drive of Photoshop CS appropriately begins with a raw file.

On the left side of the File Browser interface you can also see an automatically generated preview of the file you’ve selected. This preview can be resized to any size you like, as can the thumbnails. For the purpose of this review, I’m simply going to pick my raw file from its thumbnail, and double-click on it to launch the raw conversion window.

If you’re familiar with Adobe’s Camera RAW plugin, you’ll be right at home with the conversion window in Photoshop CS. The layout and tools are virtually identical. Adobe officially calls this version 2 of the raw conversion interface, but the tweaks under the hood and seamless integration with Photoshop makes it feel more like a part of the software than an external plugin.

In preliminary testing I found the speed of raw conversion to be equal to, if not slightly faster, than the original plugin. This makes it the fastest conversion tool I work with, and added to the time saving of having the conversion as part of the Photoshop workflow, I haven’t looked at my third-party conversion tools since I’ve been using Photoshop CS. The quality of the output is good enough that I don’t want for the minor differences I’d achieve with Capture One.

From the right-hand panel, I pulled out the live histogram window and placed it near the image. Opening the Curves dialog, I started manipulating the contrast, all the while noting the changes this made to the histogram graph. This gave me both visual and precise feedback for manipulating the details in the image without blowing the highlights further or losing more shadow detail. Since I converted the original file as a 16-bit image (Photoshop CS now has full support for 16-bit files), I had more latitude to work with as I flattened out the tones.

As a side note, I tried using Adobe’s sample image that shipped with Photoshop to test out the Shadow/Highlight adjustment tool, and it worked as advertised. The sample was of a little girl silhouetted against a well-exposed background. Opening the adjustment window the details of the girl’s face and costume popped out, leaving the background details untouched. The default setting of 50% shadow detail, I find, is too high for most applications, and although I always tone it down closer to 10% or 20%, it would be useful for the tool to remember the last used setting and apply that for future instances. Minor irritation, but worth a mention.

The photo was now looking closer to what I imagined, perhaps a touch too warm. Remembering Photoshop’s new Photo Filters, I reached for the dialog (I looked for them in the Filters menu first, where I thought I’d find them, but instead they were in the Image Adjustments menu) and selected an 80B (cooling) filter. Photoshop lets you pick the color of the filter to taste, but the default blue did the trick.

I’ve been using adjustment filters for years now, ever since I discovered Photoshop did a better job of cooling and warming my photos than did my expensive glass filters – and it gave me more control over the precise look and feel of the result. Now that Adobe have added this functionality as separate filters, with their correct photographic names, I think more photographers will be convinced that other than polarizers and split density filters (the effects of which are difficult – or at least time-consuming – to replicate digitally), there’s little need to put any more glass between the lens and the scene. The benefit, of course, is better image quality without any loss of control.

The photo didn’t require much adjustment by way of depth of field, but I wanted to try out the Lens Blur filter anyway. Making a rough selection of the sky surrounding the sun and clouds, I found the filter (this time correctly placed in the Filters menu) and after an unusually long delay it opened up with a small preview of my photo and a dizzying array of options.

I’ve seen numerous demonstrations of this filter before, but working with it first hand gave me a good idea of how versatile and precise it is for achieving realistic depth of field effects in a digital photo. I fiddled willy-nilly with some of the settings, and watched as the hourglass turned over and over in an effort to show the effects of my tweaks in the preview window. Power, I realized, comes at a price. I can only guess at the complexity of generating lens blurs, but it was obvious how much this complexity affects system performance.

I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I had to convert the photo from 16- to 8-bit mode and halve its size to apply the filter in a reasonable timeframe. I don’t own an exceedingly powerful PC by today’s three-plus gigahertz standards, and I suggest anyone who’s going to rely on this filter add one such machine with a couple of processors and plenty of RAM to spare to the Christmas wishlist. It’s a shame really, because Photoshop CS has so far proven remarkably responsive for almost any task I’ve thrown at it.

In the end I cancelled the lens blur and worked on cloning the sun and clouds out of the sky and making several other adjustments with tools already familiar to veteran Photoshop users.

The fact that Photoshop CS has retained its familiarity shows the extent to which the Photoshop name has become a standard for graphics professionals and enthusiasts alike.

I spent several more days working with Photoshop CS, testing out the new features in combination and separately to each other. Not once did I stumble across an undocumented feature, or force the software to react differently to what I expected. I don’t think I’ve had Photoshop crash on me since version 6, and even then it was my own doing. Stability like this is unusual to say the least for a Windows application, but it seems that time and testing have forged a core of source code that makes Photoshop one of the most reliable software applications money can buy. You can literally bet your business on it, as many the world over do very day.

There’s no real point in trying to pick faults with Photoshop. First, there’s nothing out there with anywhere near the depth of features and stability. There’s nothing that caters for photographers so intrinsically, while affording the same familiar features to millions of designers and artists from different walks of life. I can’t comment on Adobe’s support for the product, because I’ve never needed it.

But wait, here’s something: you can’t just pick up a copy of Photoshop and master it in an afternoon. There are no (well, few) handholding “wizards” to guide you through basic editing tasks, nor should there be. Photoshop is not a newbie application – and by that I mean it’s not something you’d want to use to fix the occasional photo for the family album. This is serious software, and requires as much time and practice for perfection as does any other serious endeavour, not least photography.

Conclusion
If you’re happy with using a point-and-shoot camera and have little interest in learning how to extract real quality from your photos, please look elsewhere. Photoshop will frustrate the heck out of you, even if the asking price is pocket change in your wallet (for most mortals, it’s anything but). However, if you’re at your best with a digital SLR in hand, or a professional of any means, don’t bother looking anywhere else. Photoshop is the world’s best graphics software for a reason, and if CS is anything to go by, will retain that title for many years to come.

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