Ten Things To Love About Photoshop
The tool of choice for serious digital photographers has always been Adobe Photoshop. We’re now into version 11, now called CS4, and the versions keep coming every few years. Upgrading every two years may not be necessary for the casual user, for the professional, its often desired.
I’ve been using Photoshop for over 10 years now. I’ve written books on it, taught classes, and tested future versions. 
Sometimes, its a good idea to kick back and reflect on whats so cool about a software title. It makes you rediscover why we love our craft so much in the first place.
First off, in dealing with many software companies over the years (I first started using their page layout software, Pagemaker in the 1980’s!), I must say that Adobe has been one of the top organizations to have on your side. I don’t have a monetary relationship with them, so my kudo’s are genuine. They’ve just been stellar in their products and support. As an Author, Adobe has also been willing to go the extra mile in working with me, and in turn, I help them testing future versions of their software.
That said, lets get to 10 reasons why we all should be enamored with Photoshop:
1. Bridge.
Adobe Bridge is a wonderful gift to the digital photographer. If you’re like me, you can have literally terabytes worth of digital files. Bridge is a great way to organize and view your digital files. Its been my personal image organizer for a few years, since CS2 was in beta. What I like best about Bridge, is its tenancy toward working with images in a folder organization, which is exactly how I work. With every version, Adobe keeps improving this valuable tool as well.
2. Camera Raw.
Adobe was right on the mark a few years ago when they introduced Camera Raw as a raw image conversion program built right into the Photoshop suite. Integrated directly between Bridge and Photoshop, Camera Raw has become the standard raw image adjustment program for digital photographers. When it first came out, there wasn’t a clear cut industry leader in raw file processing. By pure determination and constant upgrades to functionality and file type, Camera Raw has become the new digital photography standard. Sorry Nikon, but nobody wants to buy your raw file software.
3. The Black and White Adjustment Layer.
Finally, with version CS3, Adobe finally made it easier to convert color images to black and white. Before, it was a pain, either using the Channel Mixer or some other means to convert our images. With this new adjustment layer, Adobe has made great strides for us black and white photographers. Make your normal color and tonal adjustments, then create a new Black and White Adjustment Layer.
4. 16 Bit Processing.
Without getting into anything heavy or too geeky, Photoshop gives us the ability to make color and tonal adjustments with 16 bit files. What does that mean to the photographer you ask? Well, shooting JPEG out of your digital camera is nice. JPEG’s give you nice 8 bit images to work with. Shooting Raw, making raw adjustments, and then opening up these files in Photoshop in 16 bit mode gives you twice the amount of image information to work with, hence better chance for quality color and tonal adjustments, which make for a better final image. The reason I call out this in the list? Elements only lets you edit images in 8 bit mode, which is not too friendly to us raw image shooters.
5. Built-In Color Management.
This is a big difference between Elements and Photoshop. The ability to process images in a color managed workflow. This is a big deal to more advanced photographers and professionals. With Photoshop, you can open your images and edit them while viewing the image on-screen as its going to appear in your chosen file output. Thats called soft-proofing. Just go to the View–>Proof Setup menu, and select your printer/paper combination. When you turn on soft proofing (press CTRL+Y on a PC, or CMD+Y on Mac), you’ll see your output “simulated” on your monitor. If you’re using color management, and have your monitor calibrated with a device such as the ColorMunki or Spyder 3, you should get a good color rendition on-screen that will closely match what you’re final print will look like.
6. The Quick Selection Tool.
Long missing from the Photoshop Toolbox was an easy-to-use selection tool. New in CS4 is the Quick Selection tool. A nice addition that allows you to to more easily select a portion of the image for separate editing or correcting. Funny thing is, they usually test and release these new tools in Elements first, then port them to the next version of Photoshop. Perhaps the Smart Selection Tool used in Elements isn’t too far behind?
7. Layer Masks.
Something you can’t do in Elements, Layer Masks allow you to mask out global changes to an image, allowing you to selectively “paint” the changes into a certain location or area of an image. This is an advanced feature of Photoshop, and one that separates it from Elements.
8. Smart Sharpen.
For years, I’ve been terribly unhappy with the results of sharpening images using Unsharp Mask. Now, with the inclusion of the Smart Sharpen filter, I’m much more happy with the results. The filter basically works the same way , but with an addition of choice of blur to remove, and it makes a big difference. If used properly, you won’t get those nasty artifacts Unsharp Mask leaves behind.
9. Stitching Panorama’s with Photomerge.
It took a couple of versions to get this where I like it, but the Photomerge feature in CS4 is working very nicely. Its a benefit for a simplest like me to not have to use a third-party software utility to stitch together multiple images, and have it work the first time! Photomerge works great, and its a big improvement from earlier versions.
10. The Ability to Work in Layers
Stonehenge Collage made with layers and multiple images
This would go for Elements as well. The ability to work in layers gives us capability that would be real hard to pull off in a darkroom. Where else can I process a night shot of the Milky Way, select it, and past it into another image that has selections, bw conversions, and all sorts of edits in separate layers to make a collage?
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