When Adobe rolls out a new version of Photoshop, it's always an event. This ultra-heavyweight image editor is an essential tool for art directors, animators, artists, digital filmmakers, publishers, game developers, Web designers, and anyone else who pushes pixels for a living.
Photoshop has had its share of lackluster or even troublesome updates, so for you skeptics, here’s the quick summary of version 6.0: it's a painless upgrade that will make your print and Web work much easier. It contains no major aggravations (such as version 5’s irritating interface changes and color management debacle), and at least two of its new features (vector art and Web graphic slicing) will make you say “Wow!”.
For starters, the well-honed Photoshop Interface has received a few welcome tweaks. We’re not usually partial to extra toolbars, but the new Corel-style tool options bar (which you can dock at the top or bottom of the screen) is well implemented. Not only does it let you park your palettes there, but it also displays contextual tool options intelligently. For example, the measurement palette options expand in the docking bar to allow numeric entry of transform and positional coordinates, replacing the modal Transform dialog box. Now you can actually see the effect on your image when you’re entering coordinate data. Moreover, you can enter numbers in mixed units — 3 inches by 45 pixels, for instance.
Photoshop used to make you jump through hoops to create a simple box, but the new vector tools simplify that process. In a move that weirdly recalls MacPaint and other long-dead apps, Photoshop now includes rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, polygon, line, and custom shape tools, available from a new shape tool in the toolbar... These produce editable vector shapes that reside on their own layers. You can use shapes to create vector masks (called layer-clipping paths) and to paint pixels (that is, to make rounded rectangle buttons for Web use). Anyone who’s worked with Bezier curves will have no trouble with Photoshop 6’s new shapes. Custom shape libraries get you started, and you can create your own libraries or Import them from Illustrator.
Beyond drawing shapes, you now have access to Boolean operations — add, subtract, intersect, and exclude — for quickly combining basic shapes to form more complicated objects. You can stroke shapes; fill them with colors, gradients, and patterns; and set their color mode and degree of opacity. Using shapes as layer clipping paths, you can quickly create sharp-edged masks that remain editable throughout the work process. However, don’t throw away your vector drawing program just yet — Photoshop still doesn’t support many basic vector functions. For example, you can’t group or lock shapes. (A less-powerful workaround for grouping is to put multiple shapes on one layer).
Of the vector objects, Photoshop users rely on text shapes most often — and up until now text handling has been one of Photoshop’s weakest features. Previously, you couldn’t type text directly onscreen. Instead, you typed it into an archaic Text dialog box with minimal formatting options. After making only half-hearted modifications in version 5, Adobe has finally got this feature right, just click the text tool, select Type Specs from the contextual tool options bar, click within the canvas, and type away...
Adobe has beefed up the text formatting attributes to include hanging Indents, justification, word spacing, letter spacing, and hyphenation. The warped text feature is particularly cool. Select the text, choose Create Warped Text, and choose from a variety of sliders that create slants, arches, circles, and other deformations. This new feature saves you a trip to Illustrator or even After Effects. One quirk: Unrendered text looks awful at magnifications other than 100 percent, although it prints fine.
Photoshop 5 introduced the concept of layer effects such as shadows, glows, embosses, and bevels. Photoshop 6.0 takes the concept one step further by adding Layer Styles. You can now save a combination of effects as a Layer Style and quickly apply it to other layers or share it with other artists. Plus, an improved dialog box and more settings make layer effects easier to manage and apply.
Do layer effects such as embosses and bevels make you think of Web buttons? Adobe hopes so. Layer Styles is just one way it has jazzed up Photoshop to appeal to Web designers. If you spend your days slicing and dicing animated Web graphics, you can stay comfortably inside Photoshop for much of your work. A new slicing tool makes it easy to create a slice from any layer. You can create dynamic layer-based slices from a multilayer document, and the slices adjust dynamically to accommodate layer changes. Each slice can have its own level of weighted, channel-based optimization — the most flexible approach weVe seen. At output time, Photoshop produces a numbered image set and a clean HTML table or CSS code you can easily paste into a Web page editor.
Photoshop can’t quite handle every Web-oriented graphic task yet, so Adobe throws in a copy of ImageReady 3. A Jump To button in the toolbox launches ImageReady with the current document loaded. One new feature in ImageReady 3 is the ability to create custom rollover styles (for button glows and the like) based on the layer-based slices and Layer Styles you save in Photoshop. Apply the rollover style to a new layer in another document, and ImageReady slices the layer with the multiple rollover states and effects you’ve defined.
This release offers a grab bag of other goodies. Better color-management tools mean you can avoid import-export color problems — you can even go back to Photoshop 4’s colorspaces. (Make sure you have the latest version of ColorSync for best results.) The Kai’s Power Goo-style warping tool is not quite as much fun as Goo, but it’s a lot more usable... The more powerful crop tool has moved back to the top level ofthe toolbox (for a while Photoshop had it nestled within the selection tool). It allows perspective warping ofthe selected area when you drag the crop box handles, and for easier viewing It grays out the image area outside the crop zone.
Photoshop’s enhanced Extract Image feature does a better job of pulling masks from complex edges (such as hair), in many cases eliminating halos and other mask artifacts while requiring less work on your part. You can now export actions between Macs and PCs as mini-applications called droplets — very useful in cross-platform production situations. Photoshop 6.0 also supports Nav Services, so you can open multiple files simultaneously from the Open dialog box. And finally, this version offers Print Preview (better late than never) and PDF export.
We found no major flaws in this revision, and very few minor ones. Perhaps Adobe has gone slightly overboard in catering to Web designers, losing sight ofthe fact that video and animation people still comprise a large segment ofthe Photoshop market. And while droplets are great, we still hope for a scripting language that automates Photoshop operations and (eventually) works across all Adobe applications.
The bottom line: If you’ve been using Photoshop for a while, you have every reason to upgrade. The vector and text tools and the Print Preview feature are worth the $179 upgrade price. If you are new to image editing, get Photoshop now — it has no equal.
Anzovin, Steven. (January 2001). Photoshop 6.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 46-48).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (3 votes)
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2017-11-26 / 
2024-02-13 / 
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Adober_Photoshopr_6.0.toast_.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
