By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Last month I wrote about Office 2003, and since you, without doubt, read the article you will recall that it required a computer running Windows 200 SP 4 or Windows XP. The same is true for Photoshop CS. So don’t run out and upgrade to it or buy it if your operating system doesn’t meet these specifications.

However, if your system meets specs and you do a lot of work with images and have already tried Adobe’s baby version, Photoshop Elements 2.0 (which is a very nice program) but want more power, then, by all means, go out and get Photoshop CS. I recommend it highly and have found a lot of useful and quite powerful features in CS that were not in my older version 5.01 of Photoshop. CS is actually version 8.

As I mentioned in my comments on page one, I have not had time to really go deeply into the new features and will, thus, probably write a more detailed review later. But since the newsletter needs filler and I have spent some time with it, here are my observations.

First, after the installation, the product has to be activated via the Internet. You don’t have to do anything except follow instructions. This is part of Adobe’s scheme to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of their software. The activation sends Adobe the product’s serial number along with a just-created activation number. You are allowed to put a copy of the program on your desktop computer along with your laptop, and I had no trouble doing this. I did have trouble with the online registration (which is not required and is mainly to keep you posted of updates, etc.). I received some sort of Java null pointer error on two attempts. So much for registering. I have had similar problems registering Microsoft products. But since activation is what is important, I don’t worry about it. But it makes me wonder about the testing that goes into some of this.

First off, there was a very valuable movie on a separate CD that gave about an hour of quite good introduction to CS and its new features. It is produced by a separate company which will sell you 24 hours of such training for around $300. Based on the hour I saw, it is probably worth it.

The features, I investigated are below. Most are new, but the Contact sheet in a less robust form was in version 5, and the Healing Brush and Patch tool were introduced in an earlier version, possibly version 7. I will illustrate them with a photo of member Wade Herman since he is not here at the moment to object. To see the image in color, view the newsletter at our web site.

The features are:

• Color Replacement tool
• Healing Brush tool
• Patch tool
• Text on a Path tool
• Shadow Highlight
• Web Photo Gallery
• File Browser
• Create Panoramas
• Contact Sheet

Color Replacement Tool I used this to change Wade’s hair from gray to my version of blond. I also changed his shirt from a dull, dark gray to the nice blue you see.

Healing Brush Wade, like all of us who live in Florida and are over 50, has some skin blemishes. To remove them, normally you would have to pay your dermatologist $100 a visit. Here Wade got it for free with the healing brush. The healing brush is much better than the Photoshop clone tool in removing blemishes. It matches the texture, lighting, transparency, and shading of the sampled pixels to the source pixels. Thus, the repaired pixels blend seamlessly into the rest of the image. The healing brush does its painting with a lot more thought than does the clone tool.

Patch Tool To use it you select the area you want to fix, then drag that area to another area that has the same color and texture as the area you want to remove but none of the unwanted blemishes (like bags under eyes) and release it. The area is then “patched (bags removed).

To finish off, I removed the background and gave Wade a new occupation--plumber. There were no new tools used here. Of course, I could have used text along a path to put the occupation on a curve instead of using normal text.

Shadow/Highlight Adjustment This worked wonders on a cemetery monument taken facing into the sun. A piece of trivia is that all cemeteries I have seen have the grave stones facing east. Hence, if you show up in the afternoon to take photos, you will be shooting to the west and into the sun. That will result with a washed out background and a dark monument. The Shadow/Highlight adjustment fixes this in one click.

Web Photo Gallery This is one of the automation tools. Using it, you turn the images in any folder into a slide show ready to be placed at your web site. You have a choice of styles and image sizes. I created two such shows and placed them as examples at

http://www.tpcug.org/photoshop/slideshow and http://www.tpcug.org/photoshop/slideshow2. When you view the shows, note the Image Information. That is information, except for the file name, that I was able to add to each image (inside the image file) using Photoshop’s file browser.

File Browser In the File Browser you get a new interface for grouping collections of image files. You may then work with them either as a group or individually. For example you could do a batch rename or a batch resize, etc.

Panoramas There is a feature called Photomerge that will create a panorama from selected images. Of course, they should be images that overlap and are in order. I have created panoramas in the past with stitching software (mainly 360 degree ones), so I took the collection of images that I had used for that and tried Photomerge on it and couldn’t really notice any improvement. When I have time I want to take some photos with my new Nikon D100 for a panorama and see how Photoshop stitches them together.

Contact Sheet II This feature goes back to version 5, but here it is much improved. For any collection of images you can create a contact sheet or sheets like the old photographic version with as many images of your choice of size that will fit on a sheet and as many sheets as it takes to do the collection. You may also use the files names as captions.

And that is more than I planned to write, and I only scratched the surface. There is so much power in Photoshop. For example, I suspect that a thorough discussion of the many uses of layers alone would fill a book

In July of 2000, I wrote about my new Handspring at http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2000/july2000/visor.htm. I really found it useful when traveling. Using it with Vindigo allowed me to be standing on a street in Manhattan and ask it to display all the Italian restaurants within a certain distance of my location. Or I could ask it to show me all the nearby bookstores. My family even gave me a GPS module to go with it. Now that was real convenience. But time marches on, and the Handspring’s very limited memory eventually relegated it to just keeping track of contacts and notes of things to do. The newer applications, including the newer versions of Vindigo, required too much memory.

Well, four years later, I have an HP iPAQ 4355 Pocket PC, a far cry from the Handspring Visor. For some perspective, Larry Anders got one of the first Pocket PCs, the HP Jornada, and wrote about it in the article http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2000/june2000/pocket_pc.htm. So I am only four years behind Larry. But this new Pocket PC is also a far cry from that first one like Larry bought. In fact, Larry said that after the original novelty wore off, the very limited battery life of the unit forced him to move back to his Palm Pilot for travel. However, he now tells me that now he has on order Dell’s newest version of the Pocket PC, and he assures me that the battery life of these new units is much improved.

I won’t bore you with a lot of specifications. If you want them, go to the HP site, http://www.hp.com/, and click on the handheld link. But briefly, it has 64 MB of memory, a 3.5 inch TFT 64K colors display, 400 MHz processor, integrated 802.11b wireless card, integrated Bluetooth and an integrated keyboard (very small) with backlight.

The wireless LAN feature is very nice. It connects to the Internet instantly from anywhere in my house through our wireless network and allows me to send and receive email as well as browse the web on its version of Internet Explorer. For those interested, it also supports MSN Messenger. I have yet to try it out in a public hot spot.

Using Internet Explorer on it has prompted me to consider making a special page at the web sites I run, including tpcug.org, that is designed for viewing by a Pocket PC. Our links page is an example of a page that displays well on the Pocket PC. Our main page does not display well--those Java hover buttons are nowhere to be seen.

Using Visual Studio .Net 2003, I am supposed to be able to write programs for the Pocket PC, and I plan on doing that as soon as I get time. When I do, you will probably read about it in a future article.

I did a presentation to the group, I think, within the past 12 months where I demonstrated some programs I had written using Visual Basic .Net, one of the programming languages within Visual Studio .Net. And I think I have mentioned web services to the group before. Briefly a web service is an application you place on a web site that can be accessed with a request which will then send back a response. Of course, for the web service to be of any value, it has to send back some information that you would like in response.

Examples of web services are ones that provide the weather for a particular zip code, stock quotes, address correction information, etc. Web services are not meant for the world at large; they are designed so that programmers can write programs, either web based or Windows desktop programs (or Linux programs), that can access the web service to provide raw data or manipulation of data.

I have written three web services recently using VB .Net. One is a simple cost of living calculation, the other accesses the Library of Congress to retrieve book information based on a submitted ISBN and the third is for our user group officers. It provides membership information. These web services reside at my web site and the TPCUG site. Just by knowing the URL of the service a programmer can access it and use it in the program. For example, by accessing the cost of living service with a beginning year, an ending year and an initial amount of money, the cost of living service will send back to the program how much it is worth in the ending year.

For the user group, I wrote a Windows program and distributed it to the officers that, when they are connected to the Internet, allows them to look at our membership information and make changes in real time and print out reports like mailing labels. All of this is done through the a password protected service running at the TPCUG site that the Windows program accesses. Quite impressive technology, I think. So if the membership info is not up-to-date, blame the other officers. I have given them the tool. u