Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A major upgrade for Adobe
Bitmap editing tools have come a long way since MacPaint in the early eighties, running on the Mac 128. At last, the good folks at Adobe have released a viable upgrade to their star flagship product in R7. You now have more control over vector shapes in Photoshop, allowing for blends and fills. However, the tool set is not quite as sophisticated as Illustrator. A spell checker is now available in version 7 for those of you who wish to create your text without leaving Photoshop. Plugins from other vendors will work with this product, such as CGSD's RealTexture Tools. What's annoying is that saving a layered project, opened as a tiff, is no longer by default saved to PSD (native format). In that case, the user must scroll the dialogue box. A major drawback is their lack of support, at least for the previous version. When I installed the 6.0 upgrade on my Windows 2000 workstation, the program wouldn't correctly boot. I was unable to locate a phone number from their site to call. After e-mailing their tech support, I received an automated response the size of a book. A message was posted on their website forum without a response. One realizes that cutting costs (personnel) is vital to a company's existence, but the lack of support of this product is unacceptable.
Rating: - Some problems with 7.0
I have owned Photoshop in its various forms since its earliest versions. It is clearly my preferred picture editing tool, and I have owned many and continue to use a few others such as Picture It for particular tasks. So I affirm the positive comments on Photoshop's abilities. Some notes about the 7.0 release. The "healing tool" is a real time saver if you are working on restoring old slides. It has easily multiplied my productivity 3X on difficult pictures versus previous versions. Otherwise, I see no feature that is compelling enough to make someone upgrade from 5.5 or 6.0. The new tool particularly shines in situations in former versions where the standard technique of dust removal (rubber stamp tool was too tedious to use). The new healing tool does more than a simple rubber stamp and blur though that at first appears to be what it is doing. It is totally amazing- check it out in a store if you are skeptical about these accolades. Negative points- One reason I do not give a 5 star, and I really was thinking of giving this version a 3 star was a major major bug that can cause havoc on XP and windows 2000 systems. If you install and attempt to display a folder in thumbnail view, it would crash explorer. It is something that photoshop was installing, because once I removed the software, the system behaved fine again. If this happens to you, reinstall in safe mode (press f8 at boot). The 7.01 upgrade fix from the adobe site does not fix this bug, and it may have something to do with interactions with virus protection and firewall programs. Anyhow, Adobe's testing should have caught this high severity bug.
Rating: - Steep learning curve, but it's simply the best.
The only remotely negative thing I can say about Photoshop 7 is, that if you're totally new to Photoshop, completely learning to use all of its myriad features effectively will be a very daunting task (to say the least). But, that could also be construed as a good thing about Photoshop. It's loaded with a plethora of very useful, very advanced features that other competitive products can't even touch.However, once you get a basic understanding of Photoshop's layers and basic tools, you can immediately get to work creatively modifying and enhancing your digital photos and doing graphic design. If you ARE new to Photoshop, I do recommend purchasing 3rd party training materials to gain an understanding of the features Photoshop has to offer. Chances are, if you're considering forking out the considerable cost for this product, than you probably have at least intermediate experience with Photoshop already. The new features of Photoshop 7 are extremely useful. There are new tools for photo enhancements (such as the unbelievable healing brush) as well as illustrating tools that finally turn Photoshop (in my opinion) to a one-stop graphic design studio. This comes with a fantastic training CD that takes you through the new features. It covers the new customizable paint brushes (which will blow your mind), the (soon-to-be my favorite tool) healing brush, the new file browser and all sorts of other things. This CD was so good, in fact, that I'm considering buying the whole training series for Photoshop. There is a reason Adobe Photoshop is the omnipresent software installed on every serious graphic designer's computer. It's simply the best, and everything else is a cheap knockoff. True, some cheaper packages do a reasonable job of imitating some of Photoshop's features-but none of them do as good of a job. Photoshop 7 just brings even more revolutionary, well-implemented features to the table, and puts more distance between itself and the wannabes. The bottom line is that if you're looking for the best photo editing software coupled with incredible graphic design tools, you've found it.
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