Adobe Photoshop CS3 - Reviewed!

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is undeniably the best photo-editing package in the known universe, but with so many amazing tools and options already crammed into this extremely popular software range, is there really any scope for the new Photoshop CS3 version?
Quite simply, the answer is yes..

So what sort of changes could Adobe possibly offer in the latest upgrade to the world's favorite image editor that would tempt you to part with your cash?

Although it's hard to believe, Adobe has managed to make enough changes and improvements to make it worth considering if you're really serious about your digital photography. 

For starters, the whole package feels snappy, has a much improved RAW converter & comes with an overhauled version of Bridge, Photoshop's image browser. 

Bridge now shares many features with Adobe Light-room & is well designed and easy to use.

The biggest reason to upgrade is Adobe's vastly improved Camera Raw Plug-in. More of us are shooting in RAW and we need quicker and more intuitive ways of processing these large, unadjusted files. 

Camera Raw offers a simple way to do this and you can apply all sorts of non-destructive edits such as cloning, split toning and almost any change you can think of applying. 

The new Exposure panel enables you to tweak RAW (and even JPEG) images using Fill Light, Blacks and Recovery sliders that can restore detail and punch to an image. 

Your favorite conversion settings can be saved as presets and you can also use Camera Raw to calibrate shots according to your camera's own idiosyncrasies.

Camera Raw 4.0 is addictive to use and you'll soon be doing multiple imports and creating HDR composites, thanks to the advanced 32-bit editing. To make even more room for editing, Adobe Photoshop CS3 has tidied away the old-style floating pallet (which are now called panels) into little icons that sit on the right-hand side of the screen default. 

If you want the Layers panel, say, can click on the Layer icon and the panel expand like the old floating palettes. There also an auto-collapse function available that collapses panels back to their icons when they're not in use. The days of dragging palettes out of the way to see what a working on are gone forever. The new ace speeds up work flow and is a big improvement!

There are a couple of other features that make their first appearance in CS3 and they're worth getting to know. The first is the Selection Tool. This works a little like magic Wand Tool... and then some. Selections can be created easily by dragging with the Quick Selection Tool over an area. Your selection can then be fine-tuned easily.

The new Refine Edge feature, which lets you to preview the selection against a variety of backgrounds, The second innovation worth a mention is lone Source panel. This enables you to specify five different areas of an image to clone from! In a concise review like this, it's hard to cram in details of all the changes to this major upgrade but other improvements that you're bound to notice are a new Curves dialog with an overhauled brightness & contrast tool.

Making panorama images (or editing any images for that matter!) often requires a lot of screen space, and many of us can't afford huge 30-inch LCD screens, so for those of us with less screen space than we would like, Adobe has redesigned Photoshop's Interface to make more room for editing. 

The Tool box is now a single column, although you can go back to the old double-column if you prefer. There is now also a 'maximized screen' mode that expands images to fill the available screen space!

Finally, if mono images are your thing, then stunning black and white images can now be created without going anywhere near the Channel Mixer! 

A brand new Black and White Tool offers preset filters and custom mixes, including split toning, for superb mono shot results. 

Adobe Photoshop CS3 isn't the cheapest image editing software, but it is unquestionably the best package on the market, and a 'must have' piece of essential kit for those serious about their digital photography.

The Adobe Photoshop CS3 package can be quite costly, but if you are a little bit serious about digital photography, you will want to use this package and get your value out of it.