Editor's Note: This review has been superseded by a newer one which covers the very latest version of Photoshop. Please click over to the new review.
Photoshop remains the best all-purpose image editing tool, but the extra Web support in Photoshop 5.5 comes from an additional program - ImageReady. The combination still isn't perfect for dedicated Web designers.
Photoshop 5.5: $649
Upgrade from previous full version: $199
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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www.adobe.com
Ask a professional designer the question "What is the graphics program you use most?" and nine out of ten will reply "Photoshop" without having to think much about it. It's acquired an enviable reputation as an excellent all-round program for producing graphics for print, multimedia and pretty much anything else. However, you probably wouldn't get the same reply if you asked a Web designer. Instead, you'd get a variety of answers, including Fireworks, Paint Shop Pro, DeBabelizer and many others that include features more specific to the size and bandwidth conscious world of Web design.
January 6, 2000
Editor's Note: This review has been superseded by a newer one which covers the very latest version of Photoshop. Please click over to the new review.
It's obvious that Adobe is aware of this and is trying to do something about it. The company has been pushing this latest version of Photoshop as "The world standard image-editing solution for print and the Web". However, the truth of the matter is that it still has some way to go before it's a true all-purpose image editing tool that Web designers will choose. In fact, the Photoshop program itself has changed relatively little. What Adobe has done is to bundle ImageReady with Photoshop to give it more of a Web-based feature set.
For example, Adobe claims that Photoshop now supports automatic slicing of images and generation of the HTML to build the image on screen, but actually doing this is a bit more complex than it sounds. You can't just slice an image in Photoshop, you have select Jump to ImageReady (which starts off ImageReady as a separate program) from the File menu, wait for the program to start up and load the image, and then do the slicing in ImageReady. If you then want to pass the result back to Photoshop, you have to select Jump to Photoshop from the ImageReady file menu.
At least you don't have to save and load the images. Selecting the Jump to option automatically passes a copy of the currently selected file to the other program whether it's been saved or not. But it's a rather inelegant solution that takes up a lot of memory because you are running two image editing programs instead of one. With several reasonable sized images being passed between the two programs, even my 196Mb machine started to complain. Of course, this could be avoided by planning the workflow of images to avoid having to run both PhotoShop and ImageReady at once, but it's still irritating to have two similar programs hogging valuable memory.
It's the same sort of process for creating animated GIFs. Photoshop still doesn't directly support them. If you try to load an animated GIF into Photoshop, all you get is the last frame. To create animated GIFs, you have to create the animation as a series of layers and then pass this layered image to ImageReady for animation, or create the whole thing in ImageReady. And although ImageReady isn't a bad program, it ain't Photoshop. I mean, it has lots of nice features (such as the ability I've already mentioned to slice images into separate files, and automatic generation of JavaScript rollovers) and is easy to use. But having to run a separate program rather defeats the simple interface approach of Photoshop - especially when there's a risk you can end up with different versions of images in the different programs.
New features in Photoshop
There have been some changes to the main Photoshop program, such as the inclusion of a "Save to Web" option. This brings up a new window that shows you how the image will appear in up to four different file formats and compression levels. This does get around one of the major irritations of using previous versions, where the image remained in pristine condition on screen even after you had mauled it by saving it as a hugely compressed JPEG. The new option works in a comparable way to the equivalent option in Fireworks.
There are a handful of other new features as well, including minor tweaks to colour management, and lossy GIF compression, which gives smaller GIF files for a modest reduction in quality. And that's about it for Photoshop itself. The rest is the same as Photoshop 5.0.
It's true to say that Photoshop remains the single best all-purpose image editing tool, an invaluable program for anybody who has to handle graphics in a variety of formats or doesn't work purely on the Web. But the simple addition of a separate program that has better Web support doesn't turn the combination into an all round Web wizard - especially when programs like Fireworks 3 do everything the Web designer needs in one tidy package.
I hope that Adobe are working on integrating all of the cool and useful features of ImageReady into Photoshop, because at the moment it's too clumsy.
Richard Baguley is a freelancer who writes about computing and the Internet. He is also Associate Editor of the UK's Internet Magazine.
