Recently the new version of Adobe Photoshop was released. One month ago, I atended a presentation for the new Creative Suite 3, organised by Anodos (Adobe’s distributor and reseller in Greece). Greece is the first country in the world, where CS3 was presented (because of local time). What made me the biggest impression of all the new versions, is the new Adobe Photoshop CS3. Photoshop comes now in two version: Standard (which is cheaper) and Extended (with more professional features). The shortcut icon has changed (as for all Abode-ex-Macromedia programs). Now it is minimal and with two letters pointing the program (PS for Photoshop, DW for Dreamweaver and so on). Back to Photoshop now: Extended version offers 3D and motion support and it intergrates with MATLAB, which means that it is ideal for 3D artists and scientists. The interface is a little bit different in Adobe Photoshop CS3. The toolbar is vertical with one column now, which maximises the workspace, but you can switch to classic view (two columns) if you do not like it.

The big improvement though are smart filters. From filter>Smart Filter menu you apply a smart filter and then any filter you want. Your smart object remain re-editable. Using Masks you can change the filter parameters and you can toggle it on or off.

If you are a photographer and you like panoramic views, you will find Photoshop CS3 extremely usefull. In CS2 panoramic photos were bad-looking. In CS3 with the auto-bend and auto-align layers selection your photos blend well and it even recognises if an object appears in two photos and blend it in the right way, so it does not appear twice in your panoramic view. Photoshop CS3 fixes the color too.

For black&white photo lovers, there is a great addition: A new color mode. Black&white mode has great results and now it is a piece of cake to convert colored fotos to black&white. In CS2 you should convert them to greyscale mode and fix the curves to have a fine result.

Magic Wand tool is much better too. It takes very little time now to select objects, even if they have lot of edges and the colors are not clear.

Adobe Bridge has also improved with multiple additions, like zoom or effects. Photoshop CS3 intergrates well with Flash and Dreamweaver (yes web designers, Flash CS3 opens .psd files correctly). An example of what I mean with “intergrate”: You are building a web page in Dreamweaver CS3 that contains a photo, but you change something on that image in Photoshop CS3; it will automatically be updated in Dreamweaver too!

All of us know three famous image formats for publishing pictures on the web: .gif, .jpeg (.jpg), .png. Let’s see their features and which is suitable for each use.

Compuserve GIF (.gif): GIF format is suitable for small icons, buttons, logos and images with animation. It uses 8-bit color depth and compresses regions on the picture with the same color. During compression GIF loses no information (loseless compression), but when you compress a 24-bit image in GIF (8-bit), the image comes in less quality. GIF supports transparency in pitures and matte using for blending your pictures with your web site’s background. Every browser supports GIF format.

Joint Picture Experts Group (.jpeg, .jpg): One positive of jpeg against GIF is the support of 24-bit color, which means that it can picture images in better quality whith many colors. JPEG deletes picture information during compression. You can control how much information is deleted, by changing the output quality. The better quality you choose, the less information is deleted, but the files become larger. It is preferable to compress original images (like .tiff) to jpeg, because compressing a jpeg image to a lower quality jpeg can lead to bad looking pictures. The disadvantage of this format is that it does not support tranparency but you can use as background color for your images, the same color that you used for background in your web site. Of course jpeg is supported by all browsers.

Portable Network Graphics (.png): PNG begun as a GIF alternative that is not licensed. PNG’s advantage against GIF is the 24-bit color depth support and against jpeg the transparency support. That could make you think that PNG is the best format to save images for the web, but I have to mention something here: PNG is not supported by older browsers (like Internet Explorer 5.5). There are two PNG types: png 8-bit and png 24-bit. The 8-bit png is the same as GIF but with 30% smaller files. The 24-bit png is suitable for every type of image but the output files are larger than jpeg because it uses loseless compression (like GIF). PNG-24 supports up to 256 transparency levels.

There are many cases that you have to include large fotos in your site, but you do not want others to download them and use them. The easy way to protect your work is to write your name in front of the photo, so it cannot be used, but it does not look nice, does it? The more professional and nice-looking option is to build a watermark in your photos. Your work will look like the card from our store above. Let’s see how you can build this watermark with Adobe Photoshop (7 or later).

1. Open the photo that you want to put the watermark on and choose the custom shape tool.
2. From the option panel, choose the shape thumbnail and choose the Copyright symbol.
3. Create a new layer on top from the others and press d to choose black as the foreground color.
4. Draw the Copyright Symbol on your photo (with the custom shape tool) and place it where you want.
5. From Filter menu choose, Stylize>Emboss and apply the filter with Angle=135, Height=3 or 5 pixels and Amount=100% .
6. Click the lock transparent pixels in the layer palette.
7. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur choose radius=3pixels and click ok to apply it.
8. Now choose the layer with the copyright symbol from the layer pallete and change the blending option from Normal to Hard light to make the watermark transparent (like above). Play with the opacity, so the watermark looks nice to your eyes.
9. Choose the Type tool, write what you want under the copyright logo and right click on the text layer>rasterize type.
10. Apply the same effects to the text layer (step 5 to 8)!