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Unless you've been photographing a tribe in remote parts of Africa for the past six months, you've heard that Adobe Photoshop CS3 is available. It's been two years since CS2 came out, and the Photoshop team has indeed been busy. Even though Aperture's adjustment tools replace many basic tasks that we used to do in Photoshop, Aperture isn't designed to replace Photoshop; Aperture users still need to use Photoshop for certain tasks, such as localized edits. CS3 provides a number of new tools to help accomplish those tasks faster and with better results, giving Aperture users a reason to consider this upgrade. In this article I'll provide you with an overview of these new features.
One of the first questions you might have is which version of CS3 do you want to upgrade to: Photoshop CS3 or CS3 Extended? Despite the lack of an adjective in its name, the standard, nonextended version provides everything that 99.9% of photographers need. CS3 is not crippled in any way and provides everything that you were used to in CS2, plus more. However, if you want to use Photoshop for scientific work, video work, or 3D work, you should look at the extended version.
The most obvious change in CS3 is that the entire interface has been overhauled and streamlined, while still maintaining the elements and tools you're familiar with from previous versions. You can dock your palettes and toolbars along the right and left edges of the screen, collapsing them to just icons to maximize your image-working area. Each icon can be pulled into its own palette by dragging and dropping the icon, and you can also customize the palette grouping by dragging and dropping the icons. Customization doesn't end with palettes, though. CS3 lets you modify your keyboard shortcuts and menus, too.
Figure 1. The Photoshop CS3 interface.
For Intel Mac owners, the biggest news concerning CS3 is that it's Universal Binary and runs roughly twice as fast as CS2 on Intel machines. But the good news doesn't stop with speed. Adobe Camera Raw includes nearly the same set of controls as Lightroom's Develop module. Since the Develop module is Lightroom's most compelling feature, you can basically have your cake and eat it too. Despite Aperture's intelligent interface and robust performance with its slick HUD, many of Camera Raw's processing tools come in handy when you need something that isn't in Aperture, such as the Lens Vignetting adjustment.
Another useful adjustment that you don't have in Aperture is the Camera Raw Tone Curve panel. This has been vastly improved over previous versions of Curves. Rather than trying to manipulate a curve by pulling points or trying to figure out what effect the curve has on your image, there are sliders for highlights, lights, darks, and shadows that reshape the curve for you.
Figure 2. The Adobe Camera Raw Tone Curve panel.
Camera Raw isn't just for Raw files anymore. You can use its controls on JPEG and TIFF files, too. Workflow options, such as what resolution to convert the RAW file to, are now stored within a separate window—click the blue, underlined text in the Camera Raw window to open the options. There's also a new workflow option: Open in Photoshop as Smart Object.
What's easily the most workflow-changing part of CS3 is the improved smart object support and the addition of smart filters. Smart objects are a way of embedding and preserving a source file within a document. For example, if you open a Raw file as a smart object, at any point in time, double-clicking on the RAW file smart object layer within the file reopens Camera Raw and lets you adjust the conversion settings. Smart filters, which activate automatically when you apply a normal filter to a smart object, act like Aperture's adjustment tools because they're nondestructive, not actually changing your pixel data. They can be added, adjusted, rearranged, and removed without affecting image quality. This feature is workflow-changing for photographers because if you start by opening your Raw file as a smart object, even if you've been working on the image for hours and making complex masks, you can still go back and tweak your Raw conversion without having to start over.
From an Aperture workflow point of view, to take advantage of smart objects, export your master Raw file, open it as a smart object in Photoshop, save the smart object file, and reimport it into Aperture. Then, to bring up Camera Raw on the image again, open the smart object file from Aperture using Open With External Editor and double-click the smart object layer. Make sure that, under Aperture's preferences, your External Editor File Format is set to the same type of file you saved from Photoshop, most likely PSD, because otherwise, Aperture makes a new file from the image without your smart object. Keep in mind though, that Aperture's Raw converter and Camera Raw don't talk to each other. If you adjust the exposure in Aperture and then open the master file into Photoshop, Camera RAW doesn't automatically detect the exposure adjustment you made in Aperture, and you'll have to redo it in Camera Raw.
Returning to making complex masks, CS3 has a new tool called Quick Selection. When you pick this tool and start roughly drawing over an object, Photoshop figures out where the object is in the image and automatically selects the object. It does a great job by default, but sometimes you need to tweak the selection a bit. CS2 and before have had edge-refinement commands (like feather) available, but it's sometimes hard to tell what command you should run with what settings to get the mask you need. CS3 has a new tool, the Refine Edges panel, which lets you see what effect commands like feather will have on your selection.
A frequent reason that Aperture users open images in Photoshop is for combining images, and CS3's new auto-align and auto-blend tools make combining images fast. As you can guess, auto-align helps figure out how to place multiple, slightly different images on top of each other so that the bulk of the pixels in the images line up, providing a great starting point for combining pieces from multiple images.
If, for example, you have two shots of a statue, one with a good composition but a person walked into the frame and one with a bad composition but no person in the frame, you can auto-align the two images, place the one with the person on top of the other shot, and erase the person. Auto-blend tries to merge color and lighting between different images, without having to manually create a complicated mask. For example, auto-blend makes combining two different exposures of a mountain at sunrise reflecting into a lake very easy. Photomerge has been enhanced to use both auto-align and auto-blend, making creating panoramas a snap. Merge to HDR, which allows you to combine multiple images at different exposures into one high-dynamic range image, has also been improved.
There are numerous other improvements throughout Photoshop, ranging from an improved black and white conversion tool giving finer control of black and white tones to refinement of the brightness/contrast tool.
One small but useful change is the improved clone tool. Aperture's spot and patch tool is mainly useful for small, circular objects only, like sensor dust. It can be difficult (if not impossible) to remove large or noncircular objects. Cloning and healing in Photoshop is far more powerful than in Aperture, providing a good reason to take an image into Photoshop. In CS3, the clone tool has its own clone source palette to contain its new options. From this palette, you can create multiple clone sources (the points in an image—or images—from which you're cloning), switch between them, rotate and scale what you're cloning, and even choose to show an overlay when you start cloning, which displays the source pixels right under your mouse.
Figure 4. The Clone Source palette.
Bridge, the image browser that debuted with CS2, has also been greatly improved. In addition to being faster, even on nonIntel Macs, it now features advanced image-viewing tools, such as a loupe, a compare mode, stacked thumbnails, and offline image viewing. (Hmm, where have we seen those tools before?!) Even though Aperture replaces most photographer's need for an image browser like Bridge, sometimes it's useful to just browse through a folder of images without importing them into Aperture, and Bridge CS3 handles that task beautifully.
Clearly, CS3 offers a number of benefits over CS2, but how important is this upgrade for Aperture fans? While a number of features in CS3 don't matter to you Aperture users—such as Bridge's camera downloader and Photoshop's Lightroom integration—the image-editing improvements will help you work faster when performing localized edits. New tools, such as the Tone Curve panel, in Camera Raw are also useful for Aperture aficionados.
For people who use Intel Mac, the speed improvements resulting from the new Universal Binary code are worth the upgrade price alone. However, if most of your edits are global and you don't find yourself wandering outside of Aperture's HUD much, then maybe your money could be better spent elsewhere. Start saving for an eight-core Mac Pro.
If you're still wondering whether or not the upgrade's worth it, ask yourself this—when and why do I take images from Aperture into Photoshop. If the answer includes complicated tasks like combining pictures to simple tasks like cloning an object, then Photoshop CS3 will make your life easier compared to its previous version.
Photoshop CS3 costs $649 ($199 for the upgrade) and is available from your favorite Mac software retailer. Photoshop CS3 is also available in different Creative Suite bundle configurations. See adobe.com for more information.
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