Adobe Systems Inc has announced version 2.5 of its Photoshop image processing package for the Macintosh and – for the first time – for Windows personal computers. The company is keen to consolidate its success in the professional Mac-based graphics market with the new product – it reckons to have captured a 90% share the UK since Photoshop’s 1990 launch – and extend this into the Windows market. The two versions were developed concurrently and are fully file compatible, enabling users to mix and match systems. They also share a number of hardware acceleration enhancements and offer an identical feature set. Photoshop enables graphics designers and photographers to manipulate scanned or computer-generated continuous tone, bitmap, grey scale or colour images. It can be used to edit and repostion entire images, or portions of them, and to import and export a number of graphics formats, including Encapsulated PostScript and Adobe Illustrator file formats. It provides a number of special effects filters and 16m colour paint capability. It also performs pre-press functions like on-screen colour editing in CMYK – cyan magenta yellow black mode and interactive editing of four-colour process images. Device-independent colour support enables users to match colours precisely on different devices and paper stocks. Accurate monotones, duotones, tritones and quadtones can also be produced. Version 2.5 has a new software architecture that isolates compute-intensive functions such as filters, painting and editing tools and enables them to be replaced by special ‘bottleneck’ plug-ins that can support custom hardware such as accelerator boards. Other enhancements include tools for selectively lightening and darkening portions of an image; a masking feature for viewing and editing masks using toolbox controls; faster screen redraw; support for Eastman Kodak Co’s Photo CD, JPEG, PCX and BMP files; CIE LAB colour mode; collapsible modeless palettes that clear screen space for editing without affecting access to palette functions; a channels palette for interactively selecting which channels are visible or editable with tools and filters; a path palette for controlling the Pen tool; integration of all Paint tool options such as opacity, pressure and transfer mode in the Brushes palette; an improved Colour palette enabling users to save and load customised palettes, and incorporating a slider control for regulating colour modes and with a scratch area for viewing colour combinations before applying them to an image; support for Twain image acquisition. The Windows version provides full True Type and Type 1 font support and additional standard on-line help and Multiple Document Interface support for displaying and working on multiple image files simultaneously. System requirements for running Adobe Photoshop 2.5 are either an 80386 or 80486 personal computer running MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.X or a Mac Quadra or Mac II with System 6.0 or above, all with 8Mb RAM, 100Mb disk, 16- or 24-bit display and mouse. The Macintosh version will be available worldwide from the first quarter of next year; the Windows version from the second quarter. Each is ?725 – the same as the current version 2.01. Upgrades will be offered to Mac users. Adobe’s technology will also be offered to hardware developers wanting to write Photoshop-compatible plug-ins.
