Adobe Photoshop CS5 (PC)

Given the major improvements within Photoshop CS4 over previous versions it seemed Photoshop had fully matured into the de facto industry standard image editing software, and any further releases would be more about tweaking the interface. So it's a bit of a surprise that the latest version Photoshop CS5 [now shipping] has proved to be a major update, with impressive new features that save more time and further boost productivity, leading to techie magazine 'PC Shopper' rating Photoshop CS5 a maximum 5 stars. Although Photoshop CS5's myriad of image editing features require considerable effort for newcomers to master, particularly compared to the cheaper cut-down consumer version 'Adobe Photoshop Elements 9', there is plenty of on-line help and even videos to aid you.

Major new features in CS5 include better intelligent edge detection for selecting, cutting out and pasting complex shapes [i.e. hair, and it blends the pasted bit in for you], the 'puppet warp tool' which imposes a mesh onto objects to do sophisticated transformations [to say curl up an elephants trunk], and 'context aware fill' added to the spot healing brush to greatly improve removal of dust/hairs, blemishes, unwanted objects etc from photos and replace them with colour and shade matched pixels derived from nearby regions of the image. You could do all of this manually with older versions of Photoshop, but it could take ages. Context aware fill doesn't always work perfectly, although the results with the likes of natural scenes with lakes, clouds and woodland are impressive - plus carefully reselecting the object to be deleted often helps. There's a new `mixer' brush which mimics natural paint brush shapes and produces various `painting' effects (although it's still no match for Corel Painter 11). Black and white conversion from colour images is also 'improved'. Plus `Adobe bridge' media file management has been updated, and now allows a customizable panel within Photoshop.

Those working with RAW images will benefit from better noise reduction and lens distortion correction algorithms, utilising the photos EXIF info and an internal database of various SLR lenses. There's also improved support for creating HDR images. Plus all the old Photoshop CS tools are present, such as layer masks that enable you to non-destructively partially visualize areas of your layers, and the ability to write macros [Actions] for automating repetitive tasks [important features lacking from Photoshop's cut-down Elements 8]. Photoshop CS5 simply runs more fluidly than Elements 8 as well. Plus integration with Adobe LightRoom 2.0 has apparently been made tighter. The CS5 grey interface is similar to CS4s [dull but worthy]. As with CS4, CS5 can use a [compatible] graphics card CPU to further boost processing speed, although with both my workstation NVidia graphics cards Photoshop CS4/5 signals a problem and switches this feature off. Otherwise, so far CS5 has proved glitch free on my XP Pro workstation, but Adobe issue regular patches in any case.

Photoshop can now be installed as 32-bit or 64-bit [Vista/Windows 7]. With the 64-bit versions you will need more system RAM above the 32-bit 3.2Gb limit to see any benefit. Those with 64-bit Windows 7 and 8Gb system RAM should see 40% performance [speed] improvements. The alternative far cheaper Photoshop CS5 upgrade version will upgrade Photoshop CS2 or above, and those on CS2/CS3 would particularly benefit from this upgrade as Photoshop CS4 had a worthwhile interface overhaul that carries over to CS5. As usual there are significant Adobe education discounts for those on a 2 year+ course, in school or work in education. Although Photoshop CS5's full retail price is steep, hopefully it's the workplace that pays for it. See Adobe's website for more details, and there you can download a fully functional 30 day trial copy of Photoshop CS5 [or say Photoshop Elements 8 and LightRoom 2.0] to see if it suites your needs. You also get discounts for buying combinations of Adobe applications.

Minimum system requirements are Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor, Windows XP [SP3], Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows 7, 1GB of RAM, 1 GB of hard-disk space, 1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL 256Mb 16-bit color graphics card, DVD-ROM drive, QuickTime 7.6.2 software, and Broadband Internet connection for online services. However for fluid image editing the more powerful the system the better [and adding more system RAM is generally the most cost effective way of boosting Photoshop responsiveness].

I ordered CS5 but got CS5 extended instead, so thanks to the supplier for this. I have since been told this is what happens now, as they are both selling at the same price, so why not give out the extended version instead. I will never use the extended aspect of the software, but a nice touch none the less, so thanks again.

Over £600 for a software package is a big bill to swallow and a large chunk of money, but it is the industry standard and quite simply cannot be beat - if you are serious about imaging in what ever form, then there are no ifs or buts, you need this software.

However there are at least two major bugs I have found in this version, after using it for only a few days (the PC version), that I now find I have no other choice than to use a less than acceptable work around:

Major bug 1 - with the wizzy Open GL graphics mode set on by default if you have a supported graphics card - which all modern PC's do, then you can do all sorts of wonderful things, such as flick the image on screen from side to side and up and down, or load up a virtual colour wheel, or see the image zoom in and out smoothly on screen like a Mac, or even use a zoom loupe to get straight into close up views of part of the image you wish to inspect at 100% detail, which would be great, except...

When using the highly vaunted Open GL aspect of CS5 with my brand new i7 Dell PC, with 22 inch screen, I find the full screen image review mode (Ctrl, 0) after tapping F several times to also get the black backdrop, now fills the screen with a very soft and blurry preview image. Very disconcerting, I thought my eyes were on the blink or my camera focusing was off, but I knew the image was crisp, as I'd already worked on the image before. So I experimented and found that if I zoomed in once more with Ctrl +, or zoomed out once with Ctrl -, the screen showed me a crisp image, but then it was either too big to fit on the screen or showing me a smaller image that did not use all the screen real estate (as our American cousins call it). But at least I was glad it wasn't my eyes or my camera work. So it seems the default full screen setting with Ctrl 0 under Open GL, which I would want to use all the time, falls between two crisp image preview presets and instead presents you with an image that is blurred enough to make you think you have taken a really bad shot - I know the image on screen is always going to be an on-the-fly interpolated version of the actual image for viewing purposes, but even so, every other version of PS I have used over the past 14 years has worked fine in this respect and as I am using a bog standard screen at a bog standard size and resolution, then why was it doing this to me now?

What I discovered I had to do to overcome this major problem, is to turn off Open GL. Now Ctrl 0 fits the image to full screen size and displays a nice crisp image. So with one (albeit major) problem, this means that all the new and wizzy graphics animation tricks have gone straight out of the window in one fell swoop. What a basic error to make and why have they done this?

Major bug 2 - Without the Open GL aspect working which I now find I am forced to use, again when I go into full screen mode and pressing the F key until you get to full screen review mode with a black background, which again worked perfectly on every other version of PS I have used previously that did not support Open GL, now does display the image crisply, but with a light blue eye distracting border all around the edge of the screen, that you simply cannot get rid of, except of course if you turn Open GL back on again, which gets me back to the totally useless full screen blurred image mode. I suppose the blue border could be a Win 7 issue, but you would think they might have thought to test these two industry standard programs together and checked for and corrected any compatibility issues prior to release.

I have tried to get round this in other ways such as setting the display resolution in PS to the same as the image pixel resolution by measuring the screen width and dividing that measurement by the pixel display settings, or changing the way Win 7 displays screen resolution at various sizes, but nothing works - it's either blurry full screen images with Open GL and all the razzamataz, or a horrible light blue border and no razzamataz without Open GL.

So there you have it, a fantastic bit of software with more bells and whistles than you will ever need, that fails at the most fundamental level, by not letting you look at an image in full screen mode without the image either being blurry or having a distracting light blue border around it.

Now do not get me wrong, I am not actually unhappy with this software, it is what I need and also teach and use on a daily basis, but this blurred image problem is annoying and very disappointing, because I think this a result of Adobe having seriously taken their eye off the ball here and spent too much time on the Open GL trickery, instead of continuing to develop and innovate solid image manipulation algorithms for professionals.

So yes buy it by all means, but you may also find that you need to turn off all the 'nice' wizzy stuff that you may have bought it for in the first place, that is of course if you want to see crisp images in full screen mode, which surely we all want to do and should be the single most fundamental operation of this very expensive piece of software.

But in a good way! They said it would be at least about 7 days before it arrived, it arrived within 3. I had ordered a discounted CS5 with a damaged box but instead got a pristine boxed CS5 Extended edition (they upgraded me free of charge). The software installed and authenticated itself as expected and ran fine.

I did have issues with trying to read the DVD on my laptop (desktop worked fine), but I suspect that it doesn't have a very good DVD reader. It's not the first time that this has happened with a commercial DVD.

I highly recommend this reseller :-).

Also as a side issue. PhotoShop states as a minimum requirement that it must have a graphics card with 256 MB of RAM on it. I only have 128MB. A number of people online were asking about how much this mattered. All that happens is that certain hardware acceleration features are disabled, causing it to fall back on software or disable some cosmetic application effects. If you want to touch up your pictures then don't worry it works fine as far as I can tell.