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Adobe PhotoShop LightEdition
by Steve Carmeli, isa714sc@cs.com - October 03, 2001 at 18:00:46:
Adobe PhotoShopReviewed by Steve Carmeli, NOCCC isa714sc@cs.com
Installing Adobe PhotoShop LE went without a hitch. I reviewed the manual to confirm my suspicions-it shows you how to use features but not how to create artwork. When I went to Amazon.com, they had no products targeted towards the LE edition but over 600 titles for PhotoShop. Having taken a course on PhotoShop 5.0 only confirmed my fears: I have no artistic talent, and you still need it in order to make beautiful work. While you need not be highly skilled with your hands to use PhotoShop LE, you'll need a lot of technical knowledge to understand the features it has to offer, even though it appears to only have about 20% of PhotoShop's power. PhotoShop LE leaves out so many features that PhotoShop has that I won't bother mentioning what is left out. On the back of the PhotoShop LE box is a comparison table that does that for you. Having taken the introduction class, I only knew part of PhotoShop. I regreted that PhotoShop LE didn't support multiple history undo (infinite undo), but didn't know how to use the other features.
Right into the introduction I encountered a limit: no free transform. There is a transform menu selection but ito only offers scale and several rotate commands. I was able to obtain the same effect of reducing the size by selecting the Scale command. When I tried Edit|Transform, that command wasn't there. Instead there was an Edit|Rotate. Also, when Edit|Transform put a bounding box around an object it also placed a center point, while Edit|Rotate in PhotoShop LE did not.
In PhotoShop, when a layer has text in it, a circled T appears on the layer indicator in the Layers palette. PhotoShop LE doesn't do that. Also, you can't apply color to text from they Type Tool. You can't specify different font sizes for text inside the same text box. There was no Effects menu option on the Layer menu. There's no Fade option off the Filters menu. PhotoShop LE doesn't support Actions, which are like macros.\line
It seems that all the viewing tools have been kept in place. ZoomIn/ZoomOut are still there, as one would expect. The hand tool moves the image within the image window. And finally, there is the Navigator palette which contains a thumbnail of the image. A red rectangle represents the zoom of the image. If the image is zoomed in so that you can't see the whole image in the image window, you can move this red rectangle to maniplate which part of the image is seen in the image window.
The palettes and palette groups work in LE the same way as in PhotoShop. The lasso, polygon lasso, magnetic lasso, and magic wand all work the same way as in PhotoShop. But there's no history brush and other tools are missing or placed in different areas of the toolbar. For example, there's no ruler on the toolbar and the smudge tool is on its own instead of under the blur tool.
All the usual move and copy and cursor controls are there. For example, when you select the magic wand, pressing the Alt key and clicking within a selection will deselect all pixels of that color. Then, you can press Alt+Ctrl to move a copy of the selection and the Alt+Shift+Ctrl to make a copy of the selection and move it to a new location.
The Blending Modes seem to all be there and the Opacity slider is there too.
There is a brushes palette and you can modify its diameter, hardness, spacing, angle and roundness parameters. You can also load a predefined brushes palette that is included with the system or create your own brushes palettes. You can also go into Preferences|Display and Cursors and select the various options for brush size; Adobe seems to have included all options that are in PhotoShop.
The Preferences dialog box didn't have a Transparency and Gamut entry, just a Transparency entry.
There are only two gradient options in LE, radial and linear, whereas PhotoShop has five. In the Options palette, there was no orange-yellow-orange or violet-green-violet gradient selection. I couldn't really get the gradient to work, though I tried many permutations. Also, the gradient option doesn't support either the reverse or transparency options. LE does allow you to define brushes and will integrate a brushes file. But, as I said, gradients are extremely limited compared to the standard edition and didn't really work for me.\line
Though LE supports Quick Mask mode it does not support channels. Channels are a way of saving a selection for later re-use on either the same image or a different image. Thus, you can't use a gradient in a channel either.\line
Chapter 6 of the Classroom in a Book addresses photo retouching. This chapter was about correcting an image of a gondola at a dock and removing a gondola that was in motion from the image. This is one of those chapters when you realize that you need technical graphics training and that Photoshop, even the LE version, isn't something you can learn completely as you go along; you have to understand light, resolution of your scanner, monitor and printer, tonal range and light levels, color balance, and hue and saturation. The book asks you to goto the Image|Adjust|Levels to adjust a histogram of the image's darkest and brightest colors. There is a Preview option so you can see the image change as you adjust the lows and highs of the histogram. There was no Image|Histogram menu selection that the book requested but there was no need for this as the histogram is available and provides, I assume, the same function. Moving on, there was no Layer| New | Adjustment Layer |Color Balance option. Instead I went Image|Adjust|Color Balance. First I selected the image, then I selected the menu options Layer|New|Layer via Copy. This was an attempt to get a layer over the image. The reason this is important is because this way I could make visual changes without altering the original pixel values. Moving on, there was no Image|Adjust|Replace Color option. I couldn't find any way to effect that portion of the book and had to skip it. Moving on, the sponge and dodge tools didn't seem to make much of a difference, but they are included in LE. \~Finally came the stamp tool, used to remove unwanted objects. What the book asked me to do was Alt-select an area of the water and then cover a boat in the scene with the water cloned with the stamp tool. It didn't work. I don't know why. I tried several permutations and it just didn't work. I don't know if there is something wrong with my PC or the brush I selected or a cloning option or another option, but it just didn't work. The next task was to replace the overcast, cloudless sky with a blue sky filled with clouds. The task was quite simple: use the magic wand to select the overcast areas - it only required three mouse clicks. But when I copied the sky from another file and then did a Paste Into, there was no change in the image. After fooling around with the image for a while I discovered that I had to select a Image|Arrange|Move Forward to bring the clouds up-front. The next-to-last step in this chapter was to flatten the image. You do this to reduce file size; the catch is that you can no longer work on the image as a set of layers since all the layers are reduced to one. Thus, you do a Save As on the file after flattening it and use a different filename. Finally came the Unsharp Mask filter. The book states \ldblquote The Unsharp Mask filter corrects blurring introduced during photographing, scanning, resampling, or printing. It is useful for images intended for both print and online." The filter automatically works on the entire image so it is not necessary to select it. When applied the image did seem sharper to me.
That brings this review to a close. If you need a cheap (under $100) graphics package, you have some choices. The three packages I know of are Photoshop Elements, JASC Paint Shop Pro and Ulead Systems PhotoImpact. While Paint Shop Pro is a competitor to Photoshop, PhotoImpact can export images as web files. Happy computing.
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