Adobe Photoshop 7.0 [OLD VERSION] by Adobe

Mixed-media professionals such as photographers, Web designers, and graphic designers will not be disappointed in Adobe's latest incarnation of Photoshop. In this release, Adobe aims hard at addressing the issues of file management, easy photo retouching, and smarter output for the Web. While Adobe manages to successfully address these issues, it also remains true to its photo editing roots. New and improved features and tools such as a painting option and an enhanced brush palette allow Photoshop to build on its reputation as the leading tool for image manipulators. New-school designers of wireless applications will smile when they discover that Photoshop offers support for WBMP-formatted graphics.

Photoshop's new file management system comes in the form of a Windows Explorer-like file browser that allows users to easily sort and locate their images within various projects. Users can now organize projects by name, date, resolution, and a number of additional parameters.

The enhanced brush palette allows users to create custom brushes and save them as presets that can be accessed from the Tools options bar. Users can easily vary different aspects of the brush by changing the hue, opacity, or flow of the brushes for pastels, oils, and charcoal. Photoshop also introduces a new Healing Brush and Patch Tool. With these tools, users can easily "heal" their images by removing scratches, blemishes, and other imperfections while preserving shading, lighting, and texture attributes.

Adobe has taken great strides in revamping Photoshop to be more Web-ready than ever before. With the help of its companion software Image Ready, users can now easily create rollovers and complex navigation bars by using the new Rollovers palette. Additional Web-ready features include enhanced Web export functions that allow designers to preview images designed for PDAs and mobile phones in the WBMP format. Users can easily create a slide show of their images and post online using the new Web Gallery. People concerned about posting their images online can secure their images with the new password protection feature before sharing them.

Adobe has finally introduced a long overdue spell checker with wicked multilingual spell-checking capabilities. A new search and replace feature allows users to search and replace across different layers in the same document.

While Photoshop introduces an impressive array of features that allow photographers, Web designers, and graphic designers to work more effectively with Web and wireless devices, it also remains the leading tool for anyone serious about digital imaging. No other software package provides users with the ability to create such high-quality images. --Rich Ting

Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
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.