Adobe Photoshop CS 3 review

Adobe has never before released a public beta of Photoshop, and the fact that it has been released this early in the product cycle is testament to the pressure brought specifically by Mac users frustrated at not yet having a native version of Photoshop to run on Intel Macs.

For those not used to working with beta software, a word of warning: this product is not yet fully stable, so use it with caution.

The first thing to notice is the revised, cleaned-up interface, which is far more respectful of screen space. The toolbar is now optionally a single column, rather than two. Palettes that formerly sat in the Palette Well now cling to the side of the screen, popping open and closed as required. When closed, they form buttons that can show the name of the palette or just the icon, in as many columns as the user requires. It's slicker, easier to use and less obtrusive all round.

The Quick Selection tool, first tentatively introduced in Elements, makes a fully fledged appearance here. Dragging over an image will intelligently separate an object or person from its background: repeated drags will add foreground elements, while holding down Alt as you drag removes unwanted parts of the background. It's surprisingly effective and is the nearest thing yet to an automatic cutout tool.

This is complemented by a Refine Edges dialog, which shows the current selection in a variety of ways: against black or white backgrounds, as a QuickMask selection or as an alpha channel. Here, you'll find sliders to fine-tune the selection - you can contrast, feather, smooth and contract the selection with ease. Refine Edges can be used with any selection tools, but it makes for an especially powerful and useful partnership in combination with the Quick Selection tool.

The Clone tool has undergone a massive reworking. There's now the option of showing the clone source as an overlay, so it's easy to see exactly what will be cloned and where. In addition, you can now scale and rotate the clone source before cloning - an excellent way to patch in perspective, for example. Furthermore, you can specify up to five clone sources and return to them at will.

The new Auto Align feature will, as its name suggests, automatically overlay similar photographs so that features in them line up. Unlike Photomerge automation, Auto Align is very fast and works directly within the main Photoshop interface. As well as creating panoramas, it's also an excellent solution for combining, say, multiple group portraits, so that if someone has their eyes closed in one, it's easy to paint a mask to show them open in a layer beneath. This is complemented by Auto Blend Layers, which applies a layer mask to blend layers together smoothly.

Photoshop now introduces Smart Filters, which work in a similar way to Smart Objects: groups of layers can have non-destructive filters applied to them and, like Adjustment Layers, the settings can be tweaked at any time and can have masks applied.

A new black and white adjustment eases the creation of mono images from colour, with six sliders controlling the red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta components. It's far more intuitive than the Channel Mixer and has the capability to add a tint to the final image.

The Curves dialog is now larger and shows the curve for each channel while working on any other channel, and now includes much of the functionality of the Levels adjustment. Adobe has also updated the old standby Brightness & Contrast to avoid the highlight and shadow clipping that was a factor of the old version.