Web Design and SEO News and Tips » read post

My Three Favorite New Features in Photoshop CS3

  • January 29th, 2007

Adobe recently took the unprecedented step of offering a public beta of the next version of Photoshop several months before it becomes commercially available. I’ve been using the beta version for a couple of weeks now, and here are my three favorite new features:

1. Smart Filters. If you’ve ever applied a filter to an image and later wished you hadn’t or wished you could change the settings, you’re in luck. Photoshop CS3’s smart filters are non-destructive, meaning that even after you’ve saved your Photoshop file, you can go back and edit the filter or remove it altogether. Wow! Each smart filter you apply becomes a sub-layer that you can turn on and off, just like layer styles. If you apply more than one smart filter, you can change the blending modes between the sub-layers for some interesting effects. The power of smart filters is simply amazing!

2. Refine Selection. Have you ever wished you could have a live preview of selection refinements such as feather, expand, contract, etc? If so, wish no more. CS3 has you covered. Make your selection as usual, then choose Select>Refine Edge and you will be given a dialog with several sliders and buttons. As you move the sliders, your image updates with the changes. Feathering an image has never been so good!

3. Black and White Conversion. Now, instead of choose Desaturate to turn color images to grayscale (or any of the other ways it can be done), you can control the whole process of converting to grayscale with a new dialog box called simply Black and White. This has color sliders that let you control how each color in the original image is allowed to influence the resulting grayscale image. It also has a tint feature (just click the tint check box) with hue and saturation controls so that you can give your image a tint–sepia for instance. All this can be done as an adjustment layer, so the it can be refined at a later stage if necessary.

There are lots of improvements in the new version of Photoshop, but those three are my favorites at the moment.

Comments are closed.