My PS7 review.

Had it at work for about a week or so now.

This release did not affect how I work in the program, unlike PS6. Thats a good thing I guess.

The biggest addition that I find is the changed brush. Great little addition that has had me fooling with new brush creations constantly. Adobe has "sorta" successfully made a threat to Painter's brush customization, but still not quite there yet. However, this suits me fine and I don't have to fool with Painter's annoyingly cumbersome and overly complex gui much now. Adobe has boiled down the options to very nice little sliders and provides a great brush preview. With Painter, you have to tweak and test, tweak and test.... Its a maddening procedure that Adobe has simplified greatly.

The auto-color command actually has come in very handy for work loads involving picture scanning. It quite accurately adjusts the curves of an image to produce the best possible output. Now sometimes it doesn't work right, and other times using the auto color command requires some more curve tweaking. But on the whole, it is a welcome automated function for me.

The healing brush/patch tool is also pretty good. Nothing spectacular, as the results it produces will still sometimes require you to use the old clone brush instead. But when it works, it works quite nicely. If you use the healing brush too closely to an area of color that doesn't match what you want to cover-up, it will leave a nice big ugly blur of that wrong color on your brushed area. The patch tool is the same. If you make a selection that borders around pixels that are of a color you don't want to keep, it will produce a crappy looking smudge effect instead of a clean pixel replacement.

Other than that. Nothing else to report. Some of the text character functions have been brought out into the open on the menus, and other options are more out in the open this time. But just about all these options were in PS6, just usually hidden by that stupid small arrow tab on most floating menus. The file browser is nothing to write home about. I haven't found a use at all for text spell checking (as no text is edited in photoshop), and no new useful filters or layer styles. Heck they didn't even tweak the layer styles which I felt needed need some more tweaking, such as making the bevel/emboss layer style stay in a correct aspect ratio when you free transform an object using that layer style. The new blending modes do nothing for me as well.

Now here come some complaints....

Save for web results with the slice tool as the mouse option. The hand grabber was the perfect choice, as it had been in all previous versions of save for web, but now its annoying to switch to it to see your picture plane. Why mess with it?

Imageready is SLOWER. Trying to do small graphic tweaks in Imageready is almost impossible now the way the program slows to a crawl (at least for me) when I try to do anything in it. It was never this bad before....

Exporting to Imageready also sometimes does not work the first time and you must hit the button again to export. For some reason this new imageready has issues with layer sets & vector layers at times when you first send the file over.

I can't say its worth the upgrade, because some of the changes are really quite annoying or needless. The additions for the most part are good, but not perfect tools that will not eliminate the use of the old methods. I rate this release a 6.5 or 7 out of 10. I still say it should be called Photoshop 6.5 (not for the score I just gave it)

I'm still waiting for 48-bit color image editing. I know my monitor can handle it. Modern cpus "should" be able to take the additional punishment of extra levels of color. Why keep the most sought after upgrade option back when 3D modeling programs can already create 48-bit color images (as PNGs)? I'm waiting Adobe...

i love the brush thing, its finally becoming a sorta good painting program, almost up there with the best (ex. Painter 7)

Oh yeah. Another couple of gripes now that I'm sitting here working with the program as I type.

I forgot one of my biggest issues.... The scroll wheel zoom doesn't zoom into all the way in now. It simply locks itself once your image area reaches the borders of your monitor. Further zooming then becomes impossible with the scroll wheel. Why change this?

Some minor shape layer gripes. Each time you use the shape layer tool, it makes a new layer. Didn't do that before and while its sorta cool, I also liked being able to make multiple shapes on a single layer.

Also... Applying a layer style to a vector shape layer is still the same, but when you make a new shape layer, PS7 now sometimes auto-applies the layer styles you put on previous shape layers without you asking. Forcing you to clear them off if they are unwanted.

the zoom and shape layer thing dont bug me that much