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I recently needed about a dozen passport photos for a college-student son's foreign-study program. Getting them made the conventional way would have been an expensive nuisance. Instead, I scanned a wallet-sized photo into my computer, reduced and cropped it to the standard passport size, cloned 16 of them, and printed them out with an inkjet on a single sheet of glossy photo paper. It took about 20 minutes and cost about $2 in materials.
Using Adobe Systems' Photoshop for a job this simple was probably overkill. But Photoshop long ago became my tool for all things photographic, whether working with images from a digital camera, scanned prints, or negatives. And the new version 6.0 for both Windows and the Mac takes the already very good program to a new level.
First, a word of caution. Photoshop is neither cheap nor easy. The new version costs $599 -- or around $190 if you're upgrading from a previous version. That's steep, but serious photographers regularly spend this much and more on a lens. And it's a program that requires an investment of some hours of learning before you can use it effectively. But while I am far from an expert in the subtleties of Photoshop, I can use it to do anything I could have done in the darkroom, as well as a great many things I would never have attempted with film, paper, and chemicals.
FEW NEGATIVES. Photoshop 6.0 concentrates its changes in two key areas: preparing images for display on the Web and drawing. Photoshop's Web-preparation abilities had already taken a big leap in version 5.5 with the addition of a program called ImageReady. But now it's even better. Among other things, ImageReady makes it very easy to optimize images by adjusting both resolution and color display to maximize the appearance of images on the Web while minimizing file size and download time. The new version includes a number of tools for Web graphics -- including one for editing image maps, which allow Web-site visitors to select different links by clicking on different areas of a picture.
Probably the biggest change is in the vast improvement in Photoshop's drawing tools, particularly for creating vector graphics. These are drawings that can be expanded or shrunk without any loss of resolution. The new tools amount to incorporating a considerable amount of the functionality of Adobe's vector-graphics drawing program, Illustrator, into Photoshop. The shapes you draw can either be used directly with photos in composite images or as masks to cut complex shapes out of photos.
Photoshop's user interface also gets a major overhaul. One important change is that whenever you select a tool, such as a paintbrush or a pen, a toolbar with options specific to the tool, such as brush size or line thickness, opens at the top of the picture. I found the new interface easier to use, but longtime Photoshoppers may find it a bit disconcerting at first. Still, after seeing the improvements to this essential photography tool, I'm betting they'll be as happy as I am with the upgrade.
Wildstrom is Technology & You columnist for Business Week. Follow his Flash Product Reviews, only on BW Online Edited by Beth Belton
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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