Photoshop just keeps getting better. Version 6 incorporates the already industry-standard tools we are used to and has added some features that make it even more powerful. Most of the new features will be a godsend for the graphic designer. For photographers, depending on how fancy you get in your digital darkroom, you may

What the Rating Icons Mean
Love It!	Won't Use it	Hate It!

not care. Here is a rundown.

Note: Since all of these features are of immediately obvious value to graphic designers, I have only used the rating icon for whether or not the feature will be useful for photographers.

An Interface for the User
The first thing you'll notice is a revised interface. It will take a few minutes to get used to, but then you will love it. Options values are now in a toolbar at the top of the screen by default, but the bar can be dragged to the bottom or hidden. What makes this nice is that the options for each tool are all in one place, accessible via drop-down boxes from the menu bar across the top. This is going to save mouse clicks and mouse movement since the location of these options are more convenient, closer to the work space. And, it also saves space on the desktop by eliminating the older, rectangular dialogue box.

A couple of other niceties are a more logical organization of the tools in the tool box, the crop tool now has a preview (the cropped-out areas go dark so you can see the results of the crop), and there are loads of new preset options (such as gradients, patterns, textures, shapes, and brushes).

Vectors and Rasters
Probably the coolest new feature is a move towards vector-based tools. Vector-based graphics are resolution-independent. They look the same whether they are the size of a small thumbnail, or a full-screen image. Ever created a graphic that you decided should be about twice as big? How did it look after resizing? Photoshop 6 eases that resize shock in some areas. Yay! But it only works if the shape was created as a vector shape. Don't be fooled into thinking you can take a photograph and resize it to kingdom come and have it look right. This tool is for creating vector elements (such as buttons) and being able to resize and retain quality. Various shapes such as a rounded rectangle are available. This feature will be of interest to Graphic and Web Designers, but Photographers who are doing basic image-editing tasks will not care.

The feature I played with first was the new and improved (really!) text tool. Graphic Designers and Web Designers are going to love this one. Text is now entered right onto the image, without the use of the text entry box. This makes it easier to see where the text will end up.

This is Text.

The new "Warp Text" feature will save you hours of manipulating manually (or the need to go to another program such as Illustrator) if you want the text to follow a path. There are 11 basic shape settings including simple arc, bulge and flag, each customizable to get the exact shape you desire. You can add color or styles to individual characters, or the whole word . The text remains editable until you rasterize the layer.

This is Text on Photoshop 6.

Also new with text is the paragraph option. Select the text tool, then click and drag a box around it. Viola, the text is now a paragraph that can be moved, sized, colored, warped, and it is still editable as text.

Undo
While we have the History feature with the ability to step back multiple steps, it is nice (and sometimes easier) to be able to step back with the use of a shortcut key. The Edit menu drop-down now includes a Step Backward and a Step Forward option, complete with shortcut key.

Layers
Photoshop used to be restricted to 99 layers. For many imaging tasks, this was more than enough. But for Photographers (with plenty of hard disk space and memory) doing composite images, this was limiting. Now we can create a mind-boggling 8,000 layers, and we get a few new options with them. Layer Sets have been introduced which let us group layers and perform functions on the set. We used to be able to do this by linking layers, but we were restricted to one set of linked layers. Now we have the possibility of an infinite number of sets. Layer Style (formerly known as Layer Effects) has been enhanced with a few new styles, and the capability for saving your own styles. Using Layer Sets and Layer Effects, you can do things like add drop shadows to several layers at once. One more cool feature with layers is the Lock option. This will eliminate accidental editing or deleting.

Annotation
This tool lets you attach notes (or sound) to an image in the form of a small, non-printable icon. You can move the icon to anywhere on the image that gets it out of the way while you are working on it. This is cool, because you can write down different techniques used, font sizes and faces, color settings, etc so you can recreate the effect later. Just yesterday, I had to add a new button to a website. I had rasterized the text layers, so the font face and size information was gone. It took a lot of trial and error to get the new button to look like the others. Had I made an annotation, I could have saved myself some time. One thing I didn't like about this tool was that the icon cannot be hidden. On small images, like website buttons, the icon can take up a significant amount of space and interfere with your designing. (The icon is only visible in work - not printable - but when the icon takes up half of the area of my button, I can't see what I'm doing while I am creating the graphics for the button). These notes can also be viewed in Acrobat.

Print Preview
A new print preview feature will show you what the image will look like on paper without actually using up any ink. No more guessing if your components are aligned correctly. Now you can see registration, crop, and printer's marks, captions and labels right on your screen. The image can be repositioned by simply dragging and dropping.

Liquify
Now you can distort an image by interactively pushing, pulling, and rotating different image areas, kind of like finger-painting. This tool can turn an image into what looks like a painting, with pretty good blending. I was surprised that the end result of all this distortion still looked like a believable image (with some minor adjustments to the background). You can lock areas and prevent unwanted changes, vary the size of the brush, and even reconstruct the original image.

Original

Liquified

Automation and Droplets
Now it is easier than ever to automate tasks. Improvements to the Actions feature means more tools can be recorded (including recording another Action), and filenames can be serially assigned as files are created from a Batch. The Contact Sheet has more layout templates, and gives you more control of your chosen type. New to the Automation roundup are Droplets, which are actual programs (.exe files) with their own icons and are created from Actions. They are activated by dragging and dropping files onto the droplet icon. This means you can perform a series of tasks such as sizing and optimizing images for the web without even opening Photoshop.

ImageReady and Web
Several enhancements have been made to the Slicing capability. First, the tool has moved out of ImageReady and into Photoshop. There is a new Layer Based Slice command lets you create a slice based on the contents of your image's layers. Slices can be divided evenly, and you can optimize different areas of graphics differently for web use. Other enhancements include improvements in rollover, animation and image map creation.

Bottom Line
Is it worth spending $199.00 for the upgrade? If you are a Graphic or Web Designer, you will find that the time savings resulting from these enhancements will more than justify the cost. If you are a Photographer not interested in text or web, then you may want to wait and see what comes out in the next release.