Photoshop 7 icon ported to PC here.


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here is some more info i found

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A Look at the Progress of Adobe Photoshop 7.0

At first glance, I thought Photoshop 7 contained remarkably little that is new. Even recent betas were little more than code ports. The Adobe conversion to X started out quite rough. You often got the feeling that Platinum, Aqua and Windows all contributed to the interface. More recent offerings like InDesign 2 and Photoshop 7 are better but still feel like other OS offerings. The round pull-down menus on the palettes are still awkward but better than a month ago.

The current beta comes with a fat carbon installer (X carbon and classic flavors). It seems Adobe really would rather see consistency across the operating systems than truly embrace the Mac OS X feature set. Although they might claim to be the poster-child for X, they aren't. Adobe is playing it safe and slow.

The first thing you'll notice about Photoshop 7 is subtle changes to the interface. The difference between palette text (small), dialog text (middle) and menubar text (big and sometimes bold) is very aqua-like. And yet, something about the interface feels very gray. The tool palette is also gray and filled with seemingly useless gradients (gradients are big in Photoshop 7 for graphic elements and as a feature). When you rollover a tool, it lights up with just a hint of color. Overall, they look like bad duotones: this is another example of Adobe not getting the heart of the aqua experience. Once selected that gradient darkens and the tools icon gets lost in the color scheme. Overall the icons look worse than previous versions. The 'grabber hand' in particular looks like a kid's rendition of Michael Jackson's single glove. The once familiar "more tools" triangle has also changed into a small turned down page corner in the lower left hand corner of each ugly icon. Adobe has also refused to put back separate zoom in and zoom out tools. While they might not be useful for the average designer, they really help when two people 'share' a keyboard or while teaching.

There are many schizophrenic oddities in the beta. Selecting a particular tool from a list uses a nice, simple square but selecting folders from a tree branch uses a circle. These are little things but things that need attention. Adobe has a fairly bad track record of not getting these details right before shipping.

There are some subtle innovations, though. The options bar is better and on the verge of being genuinely useful. One fascinating tool is the 'tool preset picker.' Where the options bar shows you which tool is selected, you can now choose a new tool. I can only assume this is meant as an alternative selection when you don't want to sacrifice real estate for the traditional toolbar. The default settings are too small to be useful but expanding the window makes this a nice addition.

The document size pull down along the bottom of each window now contains additional options like efficiency and timing. There aren't options like shopping days until Christmas like in Illustrator, but I'm glad to see Adobe is still thinking on its feet. There is also a mysterious gray rectangle which, when clicked, reveals options to manage documents in a multi-user workflow a la After Effects. In fact, there are several additional workflow features.

Unquestionably the biggest improvements -- beyond simply being native -- are the type features. For the first time ever, creating type in Photoshop works. Objective type tools are not only as good as the old raster type creation tools of early versions but work very much like InDesign. Don't get me wrong, the delicate controls like optical kerning are nowhere to be found but there are grown-up character and paragraph palettes. The layout of these controls is clean and all the functionality you would expect is here: ligatures, bold vs. heavy, paragraph indents, spell check, find and replace, and even hanging punctuation come standard in the toolkit. There is also a new anti-alias style called sharp which is a little less bold than strong and much meatier than smooth.

Plus, an alignment command: link multiple layers and the option bar provides options to align the 'linked' layers. Now that will come in handy.

It is also fair to say that the menus feel longer in this version.

The main feature of this version is carbonization; there is little else about this version that will immediately convert the casual user but the small favors add up to a version that puts a dent into the image editing universe. I doubt Adobe will fix all of the interface inconsistencies before shipping but by 7.5 this will be a program that most of us can't do without.

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