Home > Consumer Reviews > Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Upgrade-Mac [OLD VERSION]

If you're a Photoshop user and want to upgrade to OS X--let this piece of software convince you. It's stabler and more elegant than the previous version in OS 9. I simply *love* Photoshop 7.0. I've been a Photoshop user on the Mac since Photoshop 4.0, and this is by far the best version yet. If you're a graphics professional and have been waiting to switch to OS X for software like Photoshop to be ready for OS X, then the time has come--switch away. As always, I think Adobe's pricing is a bit too high, but this is a rare example of an upgrade whose price I felt was worth it.

If you are a Mac user and have an older version of Photoshop ... well I would seriously recommend that you upgrade to version 7.0

While v7 doesn't add a whole lot of new features ... it does improve on a number of existing ones ... and most importantly it is the first Adobe application to feature their new common user-interface design ... that will be shared with imageready and illustrator.

Since it is highly probable that one will be using one of these applications ... you may as well drop down the coin and purchase this upgrade now ... before they start restricting the versions the upgrade supports.

Ask most graphic artists and designers and they will tell you that their livelihood depends on their usage of Photoshop. PhotoShop 7 is worth the time to learn and use for your projects. Photoshop is still the reigning monarch for digital photos and graphic work.

PhotoShop 7's Healing Brush

The most publicized new feature in Photoshop 7. The PhotoShop's Healing Brush lets you remove dust, scratches, blemishes and wrinkles on your images. With the healing brush tool, you can preserves shading and lighting texture. You can use the Patch Tool for more precise graphic editing. Also, you can use the patch tool on selections or channels.

Controversy. Does removing wrinkles and facial defects destroy the character of the family member? Maybe that was one of the reasons that Native American Indians refused to have their pictures taken in fear of the photograph picture capturing and destroying their souls.

The Wall Street Journal's article on PhotoShop 7 commented on the moral aspects of using the PhotoShop 7's Healing Brush. The writer noted that Adobe Systems was masterful in creating the Healing Brush but was it ethical to use it?

PhotoShop 7 File Browser

The new Browse command opens a File Browser palette. This lets you view thumbnails of all your graphics files.

In the Expanded View the File Browser offers a Microsoft Internet Explorer style view. You will see a panel down the left hand side of your monitor containing a tree structure pane where you can choose which folder you wish to view.

Under the PhotoShop Hood

PhotoShop is a Deep Program. The layout of PhotoShop has three distinct elements: the menu, the toolbox and the palettes.

The PhotoShop menu has eight distinct entities: File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, View, Window, and Help.

The PhotoShop toolbox has four distinct entities: selection tools, painting and editing tools, specialty tool and navigation tools.

The PhotoShop Palettes has eleven distinct entities: Option Palette, Info Palette, Navigation Palette, Color Palette, Color swatches Palette, Brush Palette, History Palette, Actions Palette, Layers Palette, Channels Palette and Paths Palette.

What does the New ImageReady 7 do?

ImageReady is a separate companion application to Photoshop. It lets you create web graphics, animations and rollover buttons with greater ease.

Becoming a PhotoShop User

How do you become a PhotoShop user? If you asked the professionals they would answer, "Know PhotoShop inside and out, study graphic artists works and practice, practice, practice until you can see the PhotoShop 7 menu's in your mind."

In additional they would suggest, "Make contact with other PhotoShop 7 users. Go to workshops to meet them. Don't stay isolated."

Pro Reaction

Spell Checker in Photoshop 7. Like a text document, you can now search, replace text, check spelling in multiple languages within the same file. In addition, now you can correct spelling on one text layer or all text layers in the same document.

New brush options. Brush choices and options for each brush are so powerful and easy to understand and use. Also, you have the ability to create your own PhotoShop brushes.

Photoshop 7 program comes with an excellent hardcopy Photoshop 7 user guide of 441 pages.

Video Workshop for Photoshop 7 is a CD that contains over 60 minutes of full screen, full motion, professional training video. Help's you get started with the pros.

Graphic designers who use vector-based and bitmapped images will find that Photoshop 7 and Adobe Illustrator 10 work well together.

Con Reaction

Your control over open documents has been moved to a sub menu. This adds another step each time you want to change your images. Not much has changed in Photoshop 7's look-and-feel compared to version 6's radical revamp.

Missing was Adobe Photoshop 7.0 tips and techniques that was available at the Adobe Breakfast for Mac Users Board members.

Final Notes

The perfect time to be a Photoshop user. Healing Brush is easy to use and does amazing results when you edit your photographs and graphics.

Photoshop 7 lets you work more efficiently. With PhotoShop. you now have new tools like: Healing brush, Auto Color, ImageReady 7 for web output, animations and rollovers.

Looks and acts a lot like Photoshop 6.5, but there are many little elegances added. The biggee is the so-called healing brush and it actually does erase wrinkles on a portrait. For me, that was worth the price of the upgrade. If erasing wrinkles on friends, family members and customers doesn't light up your sky, you may be able to live without this -- unless you are on a Mac running OS X. Photoshop 7 is the first big-time graphics program to make the jump to X.

If you don't have Photoshop and you're in the inage-editing business, you should get it. Photoshop is the only serious image product for art professionals, and remains the best reason to use your computer to work on images.

That said, this version has a few serious problems. First, they have completely redone the color workspace system, and it's much more confusing to set up. For me (a Macintosh user), the colors displayed onscreen would not match printouts or screen displays from other programs, no matter how I configured the program. This means that I can never be certain that images I color-correct will properly print on press or display on the web. Adobe is aware of this issue and has no fix as of June, 2002.

Also, while Adobe boasts tight integration between Photoshop and other products in the Adobe stable, I found that, perhaps due to the problem above, I could not import graphics from Illustrator 9 without the program altering the colors. 100% blacks became shades of gray with no explanation. This was a real problem for a recent project I had involving converting over 1,000 EPS files to PCX format for printing. I finally went back to Photoshop 5.5 to do it.

Finally, ImageReady 7 just won't open some files created in ImageReady 3, making it pretty tough to edit web rollovers or animated GIF files from before.

While there are a number of really good new features, such as direct text editing on layers and intelligent object layer selection, which were introduced with this version, Photoshop 7 has some definite problems. If you have an earlier version, I'd wait for Adobe to release a bug fix before upgrading. New users must weigh the benefits with the drawbacks before making their choice.