The crown jewel in Design Premium is Photoshop. With CS3 Extended, it has shed some skin, absorbing the tasks once performed by ImageReady. It does this so seamlessly you'll forget IR ever existed. Oddly enough, Fireworks survives, although it's not included in Design Premium, but can be found in the Web Premium edition. . .

One nice touch you'll discover upon launch is that the 2 vertical columns of the Photoshop toolbar can be merged into a single column, as seen below. This is now a common behavior in the suite and helps reduce clutter. Face it, every inch of screen real estate saved makes one's life easier, and this is especially true for designers still working on 17" monitors.

The new "wow" tool for us is the Quick Selection Tool (enlarged inset below). The Magic Wand hasn't gone away, mind you, but Quick Selection assumes star billing. Try it once and you'll see why. In our sample photo, we used the tool to select the dock via a single click and drag motion. In CS2 we'd have used the Polygonal Lasso which would have required six mouse-clicks. More often than not the new tool performs like magic, but can require modification when selecting in areas with similar hue or with gradients.

And here's a dock divided and united.

Smart Filters is clearly a major advance in Photoshop technology. Now you can apply multiple filter effects to layers non-destructively, turning the effects off and on right in the Layers panel.

In the montage below, we applied Drop Shadow, Motion Blur and Polar Coordinates to an image of the CS3 icons.

Since the icon graphic is on a layer converted to a Smart Object, we were able to dramatically scale it up so it filled the frame—again, non-destructively, with no distortion!

How is this possible??

The answer: Photoshop preserves the original source content and re-renders the image based on the original source data. A pixel-based image such as a Camera Raw image can be converted to a Smart Object, as well as a vector graphic created in Illustrator. Now that's too cool.

You'll never clone alone with the new Clone Source palette. You can save multiple clone sources and easily switch between them. With the Show Overlay option checked you can see exactly what you're cloning beneath your brush.

Third-party black and white conversion tools are no longer necessary. The new Black and White feature lets you drag slider bars to to add or remove colors and fine-tune a black and white version of your image. You can also tint a photo and adjust the saturation.

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