Photoshop 6: The Best Gets Better
by Tim Wilson
Producer, Digital Media Net

It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of Adobe Photoshop to computer graphics. Adobe's website calls it "the world-standard image-editing solution," which, remarkably enough, barely does it justice. Photoshop is used in everything from print and web, to video, and feature film work.

As such, reviews of Photoshop perform a different function than those for other software. The questions are never whether a new graphics artist needs to buy it, or whether a current user needs to upgrade, because the answer is always yes. The questions regard what new and current users will face as they venture in.

Photoshop 6 features by far the most sweeping changes to its interface since the introduction of layers with Photoshop 3. The good news is that those changes are almost without exception ones that are easy to see and understand, and add significant new power. Best of all, this new power is added without getting in the way of the work you may already be doing in Photoshop.

Before we dive in, I have to note that some of the online reviews of Photoshop 6 you may have already read are based on beta versions of the software. Some writers were scrupulous enough to tell you that they were using early versions, but, regardless, some of what I've seen in print simply doesn't apply to the version you'll have in your hands. I think you'll also find that few of them bothered with the level of detail I'm going to go into, but I don't blame for them that. Five thousand words now, I'll still have only covered a few highlights of this upgrade. And they'll all be right.

Pixels and Vectors
The one obvious exception to Photoshop's dominance is that it has until now largely devoted itself to mastering the domain of bitmapped images, which are composed of individual pixels. You can tell how Adobe feels at about this at the moment by looking at their website -- the link to the "New Features" section is called "Beyond Pixels." There are lots of other new features, but this is clearly a big deal the deserves a little explanation. The category of graphic software working in pixels is commonly called "paint" software. Vector art is built on math, in "drawing" programs like Adobe Illustrator. If you use vector art, which is extremely common in the world of print, you know what the advantages are -- infinite editability and scaling for one, and smaller file sizes for another.

It's a little harder to follow for pixel wranglers, like most of us who create video or web graphics. A graphic that's the same size as a frame of video is roughly 640 pixels by 480 pixels (to use one common frame size), multiplied by 3, for each of the three layers, or channels, that makes up a video image (one each of red, green and blue). Six hundred and forty pixels multiplied by 480 pixels is roughly 300,000, multiplied by 3 is 900,000. So no matter what you put into a bitmapped image, even if it's otherwise blank, the frame size can't possibly be smaller than 900 KB, or kilobytes.

A vector image uses numbers to describe what's actually there, so a blank 640x480 image I just created in Adobe Illustrator is only 140 KB. It's not zero KB, because we still need numbers to describe that there's a document, who created it and when, and the fact that nothing is in it still requires some space to describe.

My reason for taking this detour into the numbers is to emphasize that these are two very, very different approaches to creating images, so different in fact, that you've needed two different applications to take advantage of the strengths of each. There are some other applications that have tried to combine the two methods before, and rather than insult them here, I'll delicately observe that none of them are Photoshop. (Corel? Please.)

Which is why, of course, that Photoshop adding vector art is big news. (The image above, by the way, is taken from the section of Adobe's website describing the benefits of the vector format SVG. More about that later.)

Next: The Shape Tool