Software Review: Adobe Master Collection - Photoshop CS3 From Adobe Systems

This is the first of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Master Collection. When Adobe released CS3 earlier this year, they not only released single version products, but also six separate suites of products. They are Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Standard, Production Premium, and Master Collection. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information of what the new version brings to the table.

What do you need to run Adobe Photoshop CS3? On Windows you need an Intel® Pentium® 4, Intel Centrino®, Intel Xeon®, or Intel Core™ Duo (or compatible) processor, Windows XP SP2 or Vista, on Mac, PowerPC® G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.8 – 10.5 (Leopard), 512 MB RAM, 64 MB Video RAM, 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card, 2GB hard drive space and DVD-ROM Drive.

The release of Photoshop CS3 marked the first time in Photoshop's history that Adobe released two versions of the product. The standard Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended; the latter being targeted to professionals in film and television, manufacturing, architecture and engineering, and medicine and science industries.

Photoshop CS3 is the graphics editor that is developed and published by Adobe Systems and currently is the market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation. Originally developed by Thomas Knoll, and later with his brother John Knoll, the first version of Photoshop was released in 1990. Photoshop CS3 is version 10 of the product.

Photoshop CS3 is a raster graphics editor. That is, it is an editor that allows users to paint and edit pictures on a computer screen and save them in one of many popular raster file formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF. The other popular image editing format is a vector format. Adobe Illustrator is a vector image editor.

So what is new with Photoshop CS3?

• Much more streamlined interface – With CS3, Adobe maximizes the work area by making the arrangement of your workspace much easier to manage. The tools palette is now in a single column arrangement and the other pallets are in self adjusting docks. This allows for more room on the screen for your work.

• Stacks and Filters in Adobe Bridge CS3 – While I will cover Adobe Bridge in a later installment, in Photoshop CS3 it comes with a three-column layout with saved workspaces and faster performance. You can stack related images into a single thumbnail which provides for easier browsing. You can also filter your views based on dates, metadata, as well as other criteria.

• Quick Selection Tool – While there has always been the ability to extract areas from within an image, in Photoshop CS3 they have made it much easier to choose the image area with the Quick Select Tool.

• Refine Edge – reinvents the Feather feature in prior versions of Photoshop. It improves the quality of a selection's edges, and allows you to view the selection against different backgrounds for easier editing.

Article Author: T. Michael Testi

T. Michael Testi is software developer, a writer, and a photographer. He also blogs at PhotographyTodayNet and at All This and Everything Else.

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