I cant believe that its time for a new release of Photoshop already. After playing around with 7 for a couple of weeks, I can say there is a lot about it that I like. First I want to look at some of the smaller production tweaks that will make our everyday lives so much easier. Then we will have a peak at 4 of the biggies.

The first and greatest thing that is obvious about 7 is the fact that it is carbonized for OSX and it looks and feels great. Even though its still in Beta, Photoshop 7 is incredibly stable under OSX and it runs fast too. 7 is also built for Window XP.

I will have to mention here that there was only one thing I didn’t like about version 6 and that was, when you had an image larger than the canvas and you hit the free transform tool, the bounding boxes were outside the canvas. This meant that you had to resize your entire document before resizing the image. I am happy to say that in vs 7 this is fixed and the bounding box is now inside the canvas. Kudos to Adobe for listening to the users on this one.

The history palette now has a new button called “create new document from snapshot” just 1 click and any history state will become its own document. What a way to save multiple versions of a document.

The text enhancements keep coming, we can now control the style of a font from the Character palette. Functions include All caps. Small caps, Bold, Italic, Underline, strike through, Subscript and superscript. There is also another level of anti aliasing called sharp for small text.

This one gets my award for biggest minor tweak. Yes, they have finally added an option to delete Hidden layers. No more dragging them all to the trash. This is a big time saver for me, as I am sometimes working with up to 300 layers and I like to do some house cleaning to keep my file sizes down. While we are on the layers palette, there is no option for nested layer sets yet, hopefully they will put them in the final release.

And finally… the spell checker is here. Not only that but its in a huge array of languages and they added a search and replace text.

In Imageready, the rollover palette has been enhanced and now shows all the rollovers for the entire document and not just the selected slice. You can also view the animations here and easily create animated rollovers. Look for my article next week when we dig deeper into the new rollover palette.

Of course you have already heard about the tool presets. There is a little button on the bottom that says, “current tool only” I would suggest using this as it simplifies things and lets you see what you have at a glance and saves you a lot of scrolling.

The brushes palette has undergone a major overhaul. There were a few complaints about the way the Photoshop 6 brushes pallete worked and it looks like Adobe more than made up for it in version 7. I could write an article on this palette alone, but let me say my favorites are the scatter brush and dual brush allowing you to combine 2 brushes together. This palette also has amazing control for your Wacom tablet.

And last but defiantly not least, I would like to mention the new File Browser.

You can now open your files through Photoshop’s own built in browser which gives you a visual representation of the images on your disks and it also provides detailed information on each one. This is great for search those stock Photo disks and files imported from your digital camera. No more guessing what those cryptic file names mean.

There you have it. I’m happy to have had the opportunity to share some of my favorite features of Photoshop 7 with you. Is it going to be worth the upgrade? If you are on the Mac definitely! If you are on the PC… oh yes you will want it too. To use a cliché, the best just got better. Unless I see you at Photoshop World this week, see you at the café www.photoshopcafe.com

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