First Use of Photoshop CS3 (or Why I'm Going to Keep Photoshop CS2 Around a Bit Longer)

On Sunday my wife hauled our Yellow Labrador named Rocky down to PetSmart to get his picture taken with Santa Claus. They took two shots using a Polaroid camera which my wife brought home and promptly requested I try to fix. He had the worst case of Dog Red Eye I had seen, there were some pixels missing in certain parts of the picture, and they had left his leash on. She wanted me to remove it.

So, I called up Photoshop CS3 Beta on my trusty MacBook Pro, happy to put it to its first real job. I hooked it up to my Epson Perfection 1660 scanner. However, I discovered fairly quickly that Photoshop did not see my scanner. To see if I could remedy that, I downloaded and re-installed TWAIN drivers for Intel Macs from the Epson website. That did not fix the problem. I promptly called up CS2 which did have my scanner and used CS2 to scan the image into the machine, saving it on my desktop in Photoshop format (.psd). Later, I checked the Photoshop CS3 installation on my G5 PowerMac and found that it did have the scanner and I successfully scanned the image directly into the software using the PPC based machine. This is a problem apparently only suffered on Intel Macs.

I tried to use the Red Eye Tool to take out the whites of Rocky's eyes, but the tool only darkened his nose. I removed that effect and switched over to Clone Tool and tried using some dark color around his eye sockets to color in his eyes, but it was too dark. Removing that effect, I created a new layer and then chose the Ellipse tool and held down the Shift key to draw circles that covered his white eyeballs. I picked the darkest brown I could find in the Swatches Pallet and used that to create a fill for the circles. That looked pretty good, except I still had a telltale white ring at the edges of the pupils. Zooming in heavily, I used the Clone toll and some black to take out the white rings. Back at 100% magnification, I thought the effect looked good; so I moved on to the biggest task, somehow removing the sky blue leash and silver chain left dangling around the dog's neck during the shot. I used the Clone Tool exclusively for that, zooming in often to 1000% or more to meticulously replace the leash's pixels with those from Rocky's stomach and fur. It was painstaking work that took over an hour. I also used the Blur Tool in order to smooth out some fur on Santa's gloves that had been impacted by removal of the leash.

In Photoshop CS2, selecting either of those tools presents you with a closed (nearly circular) cursor that reflects the size of the selected brush. In CS3 on my MacBook Pro, only the center of the cursor was visible. I saw some instances where the cursor disappeared. CS2 acts normally on my MBP, and CS3 acts normally on my G5 PowerMac. Again, the disappearing cursor problem seems limited to the Intel Macs.

Once I had finished the picture work, I selected the Crop Tool only to find that the cropping mask lagged behind the position of my cursor. I also could not get it to move as far to the right as I needed it, even though the cursor was beyond the picture frame. I closed CS3 and opened CS2 and cropped the picture normally.

I saved the picture as a .JPG using CS3, and that seemed to work well. But I guess I just found out why they call it “beta software”. Certainly, if you're any kind of a professional thinking about moving to CS3, don't, at least not without a copy of CS2 there to bail you out when you find something that doesn't work. Wait. CS3 is a great piece of software and will be really great when the final version is released; but, until then, it just ain't ready for prime time. You'll need to keep CS2 around for a bit longer.