What You Can Do With Photoshop CS
- Prior to Photoshop CS, digital photographers needed to buy additional software to process RAW, or uncompressed, unprocessed photos in Photoshop. Adobe Camera RAW, or ACR, became integrated with Photoshop in CS, allowing you to import your RAW format files from whichever camera you used into CS for post-processing. For digital photographers, this saved a bit of money but, more importantly, allowed for full control over digital photos in one program. RAW photos save all photographic information, including shutter speed, aperture, white balance and exposure and can be adjusted on a PC, unlike JPEG photos, which are compressed to save space.
- Photoshop has always allowed users fairly complete control over the color and light of images, but the histogram and color features improved between Photoshop 7.0 and CS. The histogram -- that little sonar-style graph that shows the light values of your image -- stepped to the forefront in Photoshop CS and now has its own palette, allowing you to monitor changes in real-time. The histogram is also helpful for photographers as a measure of the exposure of an image.
- Photoshop CS also uses 16-bit color instead of the 8-bit color of its previous versions, which effectively doubles the number of available colors you can use. It's match color batch command lets you apply the same color palette to a series of images to create a standard look and feel. Match color also bridges between photos, which is helpful for creating digital collages for Web projects; the right edge of one photo can match the left edge of the next in a sequence.
- In early versions of Photoshop, it wasn't exactly easy to add and modify text on an image. Photoshop CS marked the introduction of text on a path by Adobe, which lets you type on a specific path and shape paths to match the shapes in your images. You can wrap text in a circle around a shape to blend more naturally with your image, instead of typing and turning each letter as in earlier editions of the software.
- Layers have always been a key components of Photoshop. With layers, you stack different elements of a graphic on top of one another, hiding and moving them around as necessary. Complex images may have dozens or hundreds of layers, which was difficult to keep track of until Photoshop CS, which lets you create layer folders and subfolders within an image.
