Photoshop Review

Photoshop is the undisputed king of photography software, but many of us who use it every day haven’t bothered to buy every new version. With the launch of Photoshop CS5, which marks the 20th anniversary of the package, I wanted to know if the upgrade was worth the money.

CS5 has four major improvements that – on paper – jumped out at me. The most exciting is content-aware fill – and when I first used it on one of my photos, my jaw dropped.

I had taken a picture of a French manor house, which was perfect, except that a gardener was standing in front of it. Using the lasso tool, I drew very roughly around the man and pressed Delete. The Fill dialogue box appeared. Into that, I chose content-aware fill. Photoshop, almost magically, replaced the gardener with the brickwork and the climbing plant that he was standing in front of. It was as though he had never been there. Of course, it’s not the actual brickwork or plant that Photoshop recreates, but the progam’s guess is fantastically convincing.

Before content-aware fill, removing the gardener would have taken me ages to achieve with cloning tools. Actually, given the complexity of the plant, I would probably have just thrown out the picture.

Content-aware fill has other uses, too. If an image needs rotating because the horizontal lines in it are at an angle, the rotation leaves gaps at the edge of the picture. In the old days, I had to crop the picture to fix this, even when the cropping meant that composition of the photo suffered. Now I can use the fill feature, instead, and get the composition that I was after.

Frankly, this feature is such a time saver that it justifies the cost of the upgrade on its own, but there’s more.

Perfect exposure

Adobe has overhauled how it deals with high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging. This geeky-sounding name refers to very contrasty photographs where it is difficult to get both the highlights and the shadows correctly exposed.

While camera manufacturers have invested a lot of research into increasing the megapixels of their cameras, they’ve so far done little to make cameras see the full range of light (from dark shadows to very bright highlights) that the human eye can. The result is that many photographs have very good foreground detail but the sky above is “blown out” – it appears as plain white, with the clouds and blue background ignored by the camera.

Up until now, I’ve solved this technical problem in the traditional way, which is to attach graduated filters – see-through sheets of resin – to the front of my lenses. The top half of these filters is shaded. This makes skies darker, which reduces the dynamic range of the image and ensures that the camera exposes the whole of the picture correctly.

The problem with filters is that they work best when a horizon is a straight line. Good-quality filters are also expensive to buy and some extreme wide-angle lenses have bulging fronts that prevent standard filters from being attached.

Enter HDR. The photographer takes three images – one exposed for the highlights, one for the midtones and one for the shadows. These are then merged in software to create a perfectly exposed image from top to bottom.

Photographers have often relied upon third-party plug-ins for HDR, but with Photoshop’s new HDR Pro feature, this is unlikely to last. The HDR Pro window is easier to use than its predecessor in CS4. Merging images is also speedier, and – importantly – there’s now a “de-ghosting” option to help compensate for movement that’s occurred between the merged shots (caused, for example, by wind blowing on trees).

Being old-school, I still prefer using filters to HDR most of the time as they mean less work on the computer after shooting. But many photographers have enthusiastically adopted HDR as their preferred technique and Photoshop will support them well.

Fixing lens imperfections

The third major improvement to Photoshop is the overhauled lens-correction dialogue box. All lens designs inevitably involve compromises, and the software now knows about the flaws in a number of them. If you choose the lens correction feature, it will automatically work out which camera and lens combination you took the picture with and then apply corrections to a lens’s chromatic aberrations, geometric distortion and unwanted vignetting.

At present, the camera and lens combinations that Photoshop knows about are limited. For example, I often use a Nikon D90 camera with Nikon’s 18mm f/2.8 lens. The camera is understood but the lens is not – which is hardly surprising, given that Nikon only made 7,000 of them.

The good news is that Adobe has created a standalone utility calledLens Profile Creator. This lets users create their own camera and lens profiles and then share them online, so it can only be a matter of time before pretty much any combination will be known by the software.

In a tab within Photoshop’s lens-distortion dialogue box, Adobe has placed its tweeked options for correcting the distortion caused by the camera being used at an angle. This normally occurs when the camera is pointed upwards to get the full height of building in the shot. Photoshop’s options are vital when taking pictures of buildings as they let allow photographers to eliminate the resulting “converging verticals”, which can ruin pictures.

Perfect cut-outs

Photoshop’s fourth major improvement is that the tools for cutting around very complicated objects have been perfected. In the past, it was possible, with the lasso or quick selection tools, to remove a person with frizzy hair from their background.

But the results were only OK if you didn’t look too closely, and they often needed labourious manual adjustments. Now, the quality of the quick-selection tool’s results are breathtaking: it has an edge-detection option, in which tiny strands of hair are cleverly understood and separated from the background.

Conclusion

Taken together, these four new features solve significant problems that photographers face, making Photoshop CS5 not just an impressive upgrade, but the most important upgrade for photographers since Photoshop 5 added colour management and multiple-undos in 1998. At under £190, as an upgrade, it is worth every penny.

For users of recent Mac machines with 64-bit processors, there is also a welcome speed boost caused by the introduction of 64-bit code, something that Windows users have benefitted from since CS4. Adobesays that, using the independent tests from the Lloyd Chambers’ Mac Performance Guide, Photoshop CS5 is between 1.4 and 2.1 times faster than CS4 on a currently available Mac Pro. But owners of old PowerPC Macs should note that they are no longer supported by the package.

Those on a tight budget might want to wait for the next version of the software’s little brother, Photoshop Elements, to see if any of these features are implemented there. But professional users and serious amateurs will find the full package – which retails at just under £600 – just what they need.

Posted in: Mac, Windows