Enhancing Images in Photoshop CS3

As we continue with our analysis of Photoshop CS3, the good news is that Adobe has launched Photoshop CS3. Adobe Creative Suite 3 will be shipped by the last week of April 2007. You can purchase it separately or upgrade from your existing Photoshop version. What’s more, if you purchase Photoshop CS3 you also get Adobe Reader, Bridge CS3, royalty free stock photographs, sample actions and art files. We discussed a lot of new features in Photoshop CS3 in the February, March and April Issues (p118, p120 and p74 respectively). Let’s discuss some more new and exciting features.

Clone Stamp tool

The Clone Stamp Tool has been made jazzier and more useful. The clone source palette has been added under the Window menu. You can now see the preview of the sampled source and make samples of five different sources, from the same image or multiple images. There is also an option for using the current layer or underlying layers. Whenever you select Clone Stamp tool from the tool palette, a panel will appear on the right side called Clone Source (you can also select it from the Window menu). In the Clone Source panel, there are five unique settings that you can set up for your Clone source.

The default setting is for normal painting. Select the source material and sample it using the alt/option key. After sampling the source material, open the destination image, make a new blank layer and start painting. You can preview the image before you start painting. For this, click on Show Overlay box inside the Clone Source Palette. Now you can preview the cloning image at the destination screen. You can also change the opacity of the clone source image and also make it more light or dark. Configure it as the normal mode and start painting at the destination image.

he clone source palette contains five unique settings. You can paint the image in normal, rotation or distortion mode and can see the preview before you start

Select the second unique setting from
the Clone Source Palette, change the width/height 50% and start painting at the other end. There is no need to sample the source image again and again, whenever
you change the setting. What happens here is that you are painting the same material, at
a different location, and in a different size. If you select other unique settings, you can
paint the image in rotation mode and distortion mode.

Vanishing Point 2

Another new feature in Photoshop CS3 is Vanishing Point 2.0—the next generation filter. The Vanishing Point filter was one of the amazing new features in CS2. This filter allows you to paint in perspective. You could also create perpendicular edges in Photoshop CS2. But in Photoshop CS3, these edges can swing. In fact when you tear off a perpendicular plane, its angle can be adjusted to anything you want, giving you more flexibility.

Merge to HDR 32 Bit Imaging

When Adobe introduced the 32 bit high dynamic range imaging (HDR) in CS2, to create an image with an entended dynamic range, its functions were very limited, and mainly constituted the Merge to HDR command and some basic imaging functions like cropping and cloning.

The vanishing point filter can now be used to paint not just the perspective but you can also adjust the angles

Photoshop CS3 comes with a lot of improvement in 32-bit imaging. Now you can open a 32-bit image created in any 3D software and enhance it the way you want. Also Photoshop now makes it a lot easier to create new 32-bit images out of multiple exposures from a single camera.

A camera is limited to record the amount of shadow and highlight information at the same time. If you concentrate on the shadows, the highlight area becomes white. On the other hand, if you concentrate on the highlight area, the shadow areas become black or lose details.

32-bit HDR images feature allows you to create images with clarity in the shadow and highlighted areas

Using this tool, you can take multiple photographs by adjusting the exposure of the camera each time, place them together in layers and use layer masks to reveal areas of each picture to produce an extended dynamic range. CS3 uses the Auto align feature to remove the mis-registration and align all photos in a proper sequence.

To start using this feature, go to File >Automate >Merge to HDR. This will open the Merge to HDR screen. Browse the photo images you want to make 32-bit HDR. However, take care that all images should be of the same size and don’t forget to activate the ‘Attempt to Automatically Align Source’ images box. 3D artists and videographers can use these HDR images to produce texture maps, lighting masks and more. Photographers can also use these features to make good quality photographs with clarity in the shadow and highlight areas. Up to 500 frames of a QuickTime movie can be converted into layers in Photoshop CS3.

Device Central

Device Central is a new addition in Photoshop CS3 that lets you save Web pages and send them across to a mobile device. You can access Device Central from the File menu. You can either create a new image or use the existing device template.

This feature is good for people developing content for mobile devices. It has data on various phones/mobiles, so you can easily create content without too much hassles. You can see what specifications for different mobiles such as screen dimensions, color depth, platform, weight, OS and image types. This will eliminate the process of testing multiple modes to find perfect settings, speeding up the design time substantially.

The Device Central offers a wide range of category and filtering tools to quickly narrow down the list of phones. You also can build your own list of phones which allows you to effortlessly work with the phones you care about.