Home > Consumer Reviews > Adobe Photoshop 7.0 [OLD VERSION]

Bitmap editing tools have come a long way since MacPaint in the early eighties, running on the Mac 128. At last, the good folks at Adobe have released a viable upgrade to their star flagship product in R7.

You now have more control over vector shapes in Photoshop, allowing for blends and fills. However, the tool set is not quite as sophisticated as Illustrator.

A spell checker is now available in version 7 for those of you who wish to create your text without leaving Photoshop.

Plugins from other vendors will work with this product, such as CGSD's RealTexture Tools.

What's annoying is that saving a layered project, opened as a tiff, is no longer by default saved to PSD (native format). In that case, the user must scroll the dialogue box.

A major drawback is their lack of support, at least for the previous version. When I installed the 6.0 upgrade on my Windows 2000 workstation, the program wouldn't correctly boot. I was unable to locate a phone number from their site to call. After e-mailing their tech support, I received an automated response the size of a book. A message was posted on their website forum without a response. One realizes that cutting costs (personnel) is vital to a company's existence, but the lack of support of this product is unacceptable.

This latest version turns out to be a very pleasant suprise, and i would already find it difficult bto return to vers 6.
The new interface is lovely, unlike some new software which looks like the interface was designed with three crayons.
The tweaks such as too the dialogue boxes was an unexpected bonus, as now much finer adjustments can be made, also new and more powerful curves features. dint personally see too much benefit from auto colours but i guess itll prove occasionally handy.
The file browser is long overdue, this was one major feature i always preferred from Corel Photopaint, and finally we have it in Photoshop, maybe four years too late but nonetheless usefull.
The major enhance ment for me is the ability to save tool settings, not least the Crop tool, each tool can be configured with customised settings, which means no more painful typing in the same settings 50 times a day. Again its a case of why didnt we have this in version 5, but better late than never.
The new tools are pretty cool, i love the patch tool, it literally has taken my breath away, magic is not the word. the healing brush isnt quite as user friendly and as obviously useful to me , but this will no doubt make a bit more sense after further use.
The pattern maker has proved to be quite interesting and can actually be used to create some new twists when tinkered with enough.
I find this version (running on XP) runs a little faster.
all in all worth the upgrade

For Photographers: I humbly consider myself a weekend shutterbug, and thanks to Photoshop I'm a much better photographer then I actually am :-)

Every wanna-be photographer such as myself has taken a photo that you just KNEW was going to a masterpiece, only to discover it was somewhat of a flop. Enter the magic of Photoshop. Once you've got your photograph imported into Photoshop you are limited only my imagination. Brighten or change your colors, change the overall hues, remove distracting objects from the background, sharpen the entire image or just a small selection, play with the saturation and contrast, crop, shrink, enlarge... the possibilities are endless.

Or, if you want to get more into the advanced aspects of Photoshop you can, with a little playing and learning, learn how to use some of the effects to make images that would never be possible with just a camera. Create fantasy images, digital renditions of your imagination, metallic chrome lettering, that transparent "plastic" look that Apple made famous, etc. etc. etc.

For website designers: While photography is a weekend hobby, building websites is how I pay the mortgage and put food on the table. Every site begins in Photoshop where I create three or four screenshots from which a client may select their future web site. I honestly don't know how anyone could making a living in this industry without being a semi-master at Photoshop. Once you learn how, it's remarkably easy to put together screen shots with the depth and pazaz that all web surfers have come to expect.

There are a couple subtle features in 7.0 that I don't see any other reviews have mentioned. Yes, the Healing Brush is wicked cool and I use it a TON in photo touchup, but I hardly touch it when designing web pages. What I find massively useful is the improved ability to make text look professional.

Previous versions often made text look choppy and would put funny spacing between letters. Until v7.0 it wasn't possible to copy text from another application and paste into Photoshop, or vise-versa. The spell checker is a god-send. And it also gives you the ability to easily and quickly do fun effects with your text like bending, warping, and twisting without having to rasterize it into a non-text layer.

If you have never used a previous version you should be aware that there is a very steep learning curve. Nothing about Photoshop is, at first, easy or intuitive. But there is a wealth of books out there to help you learn, and in a short time you can learn the basic bells and whistles and be on your way to fancy photo editing or fun web design.

It is such a massively powerful application that I'm curious to see how they will make it even better in v8.0.

There is no doubt that Adobe Photoshop 7 is an extremely powerful tool well suited to the needs of professionals. It has the capabilities of doing things with raster images which are simple amazing for someone like me who is at the Etch-a-sketch level of development. That being said, it is also a particularly frustrating tool for someone like me to try and use. Perhaps this is because it is complex beyond my needs and desires but it also has something to do with the infuriating user interface.

I am not particularly interested in doing graphic art work. I just need it sometimes. So it is that I was fairly resistant to learning the program. In time, though, I did need its capabilities. I just hated wading through the Adobe interface. I have the same problem with PageMaker; it is me, not the program.....usually.

Photoshop is extremely capable. It is also pricy. I would venture to say that unless you need all of the advanced capabilities, you could do better with another package. I like the Macromedia Fireworks interface. Still, Photoshop leads the pack. It is the standard. It is a status that has been earned. I just wish the interface was more intuitive and simple.

Everybody talks of Photoshop simply as software. But it's implications in the modern day digital world are huge. Photoshop as an invention has been as influential as the light bulb, because it has changed our perception of reality. Today, every time we look at an image, say it's on a website, a magazine, television or any printed media, we wonder or contemplate the posibility of how much "Photoshopped" the image is. In the popular realm Photoshop can create crazy aberrations that are at times fun, and to the trained eye you can detect just where the editing took place. But in the hands of experts, we can just wonder how much media images have been manipulated without us ever noticing. What Photoshop has done over the years is to democratize digital image editing, something that was one time limited to high end image labs and pros. Photoshop has no real learning curve, because it's progressive. The thing is that if you're intrested, go for it, there are hundreds of learning resources available (tutorials included with the software are complete and comprehensive). Photoshop is a must have tool.