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Weekend Update: Photoshop 7 for OS X Announced Today


Sunday — Adobe today unveiled Photoshop 7.0 with a host of new features and native support for Mac OS X and Windows XP. New features include, aside from, of course, an Aqua interface on X as demonstrated at Macworld San Francisco, a Healing Brush to retouch images marred by dust, blemishes, and wrinkles, a File Browser (which has the cool added feature of being able to see EXIF info from digital cameras like date and exposure information), automatic web gallery production, a new painting engine with custom brushes and organic brush effects, spell-checking, Pattern Maker for textures like rocks and sand, and enhanced Liquify plug-in for warping.

ImageReady has also been upgraded with improved compression and transparency support, more rollover types, more integrated support for interactive web graphics, and and an optimized WBMP format for PDAs and wireless devices. Had to do a little digging on that last point: apparently WBMP stands for Wireless BitMaP, an uncompressed monochrome graphics format which is the standard format on WAP. While of little use to most of us, it’s nice to see Adobe aware of distribution to portable formats, and graphics creators will have a much easier time working with developers thanks to this support! In another geeky-cool feature, Photoshop will now integrate with Adobe’s AlterCast dynamic imaging server software.

The important news: when? Adobe says only “second quarter”, though Cnet reports a more specific date: April. Pricing is set at US$609, US$149 upgrade, US$499 for Photoshop LE or Elements users. Adobe hasn’t yet made educational pricing available; stay tuned.

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.