Adobe Photoshop 7.0 [OLD VERSION]

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Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000063EMG
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 25, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,845 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Mixed-media professionals such as photographers, Web designers, and graphic designers will not be disappointed in Adobe's latest incarnation of Photoshop. In this release, Adobe aims hard at addressing the issues of file management, easy photo retouching, and smarter output for the Web. While Adobe manages to successfully address these issues, it also remains true to its photo editing roots. New and improved features and tools such as a painting option and an enhanced brush palette allow Photoshop to build on its reputation as the leading tool for image manipulators. New-school designers of wireless applications will smile when they discover that Photoshop offers support for WBMP-formatted graphics.

Photoshop's new file management system comes in the form of a Windows Explorer-like file browser that allows users to easily sort and locate their images within various projects. Users can now organize projects by name, date, resolution, and a number of additional parameters.

The enhanced brush palette allows users to create custom brushes and save them as presets that can be accessed from the Tools options bar. Users can easily vary different aspects of the brush by changing the hue, opacity, or flow of the brushes for pastels, oils, and charcoal. Photoshop also introduces a new Healing Brush and Patch Tool. With these tools, users can easily "heal" their images by removing scratches, blemishes, and other imperfections while preserving shading, lighting, and texture attributes.

Adobe has taken great strides in revamping Photoshop to be more Web-ready than ever before. With the help of its companion software Image Ready, users can now easily create rollovers and complex navigation bars by using the new Rollovers palette. Additional Web-ready features include enhanced Web export functions that allow designers to preview images designed for PDAs and mobile phones in the WBMP format. Users can easily create a slide show of their images and post online using the new Web Gallery. People concerned about posting their images online can secure their images with the new password protection feature before sharing them.

Adobe has finally introduced a long overdue spell checker with wicked multilingual spell-checking capabilities. A new search and replace feature allows users to search and replace across different layers in the same document.

While Photoshop introduces an impressive array of features that allow photographers, Web designers, and graphic designers to work more effectively with Web and wireless devices, it also remains the leading tool for anyone serious about digital imaging. No other software package provides users with the ability to create such high-quality images. --Rich Ting

Amazon.com Review

With each new version of Photoshop, Adobe never fails to come up with an awe-inspiring mix of great new features, productivity enhancements, and tweaks and treats. Version 7 is no exception. Major points of interest include a new healing brush that removes facial wrinkles and other surface blemishes with incredible ease, a long-awaited file browser that allows you to view image thumbnails and metadata, enhanced Web features, automatic color correction, and even a spell checker.

One of Photoshop's many strengths is the versatility of its tools, and this has been stretched to new limits. Filter previews are bigger, the Liquify tool has been enhanced, brush parameters have been extended, and commonly used tool settings can be saved as presets. This means you can virtually do away with the toolbox, instead selecting tools with exactly the settings you need from the presets palette.

Image Ready, Photoshop's Web-authoring and export module, remains a separate, linked application. Creation of rollovers is simpler and a new "selected" rollover state takes some of the repetitive strain out of nav-bar production.

New output options include Picture Package, which allows you to print multiple images on a single page, and new templates and security watermarking for Web galleries.

All in all, this is an upgrade guaranteed to keep Photoshop at the cutting edge of professional image editing. --Ken McMahon

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

136 of 137 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some problems with 7.0, November 3, 2002

By	Mak Thorpe "makthorpe" (Honolulu, Hawaii) - See all my reviews

I have owned Photoshop in its various forms since its earliest versions. It is clearly my preferred picture editing tool, and I have owned many and continue to use a few others such as Picture It for particular tasks. So I affirm the positive comments on Photoshop's abilities.

Some notes about the 7.0 release. The "healing tool" is a real time saver if you are working on restoring old slides. It has easily multiplied my productivity 3X on difficult pictures versus previous versions. Otherwise, I see no feature that is compelling enough to make someone upgrade from 5.5 or 6.0. The new tool particularly shines in situations in former versions where the standard technique of dust removal (rubber stamp tool was too tedious to use). The new healing tool does more than a simple rubber stamp and blur though that at first appears to be what it is doing. It is totally amazing- check it out in a store if you are skeptical about these accolades.

Negative points- One reason I do not give a 5 star, and I really was thinking of giving this version a 3 star was a major major bug that can cause havoc on XP and windows 2000 systems. If you install and attempt to display a folder in thumbnail view, it would crash explorer. It is something that photoshop was installing, because once I removed the software, the system behaved fine again. If this happens to you, reinstall in safe mode (press f8 at boot). The 7.01 upgrade fix from the adobe site does not fix this bug, and it may have something to do with interactions with virus protection and firewall programs. Anyhow, Adobe's testing should have caught this high severity bug.

106 of 109 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Steep learning curve, but it's simply the best., May 23, 2002

By	M. Riffle "tao_of_biology" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The only remotely negative thing I can say about Photoshop 7 is, that if you're totally new to Photoshop, completely learning to use all of its myriad features effectively will be a very daunting task (to say the least). But, that could also be construed as a good thing about Photoshop. It's loaded with a plethora of very useful, very advanced features that other competitive products can't even touch.

However, once you get a basic understanding of Photoshop's layers and basic tools, you can immediately get to work creatively modifying and enhancing your digital photos and doing graphic design. If you ARE new to Photoshop, I do recommend purchasing 3rd party training materials to gain an understanding of the features Photoshop has to offer.

Chances are, if you're considering forking out the considerable cost for this product, than you probably have at least intermediate experience with Photoshop already. The new features of Photoshop 7 are extremely useful. There are new tools for photo enhancements (such as the unbelievable healing brush) as well as illustrating tools that finally turn Photoshop (in my opinion) to a one-stop graphic design studio.

This comes with a fantastic training CD that takes you through the new features. It covers the new customizable paint brushes (which will blow your mind), the (soon-to-be my favorite tool) healing brush, the new file browser and all sorts of other things. This CD was so good, in fact, that I'm considering buying the whole training series for Photoshop.

There is a reason Adobe Photoshop is the omnipresent software installed on every serious graphic designer's computer. It's simply the best, and everything else is a cheap knockoff. True, some cheaper packages do a reasonable job of imitating some of Photoshop's features-but none of them do as good of a job. Photoshop 7 just brings even more revolutionary, well-implemented features to the table, and puts more distance between itself and the wannabes. The bottom line is that if you're looking for the best photo editing software coupled with incredible graphic design tools, you've found it.

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The only PRO photo/paint package but not the only package.., January 23, 2004

By	OverTheMoon ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Okay here is the lowdown on why you should get this product and why you should not get this product.

You should get this product if:

- You want to learn the #1 photo/paint package that is an industry standard.
- You do not mind the massive learning curve.
- If you do not want something that you pop out of the box and use right away without spending weeks learning it.
- If you want total control over every aspect of paint/photo manipulation.
- If you do not mind it being a bit slow.
- If you do not mind it taking up a lot of hard disk space.

You should not get this product if:

- You do not need to learn an industry standard package.
- If you want to use something right away out of the box.
- If you do not need total control over every aspect of paint/photo manipulation.
- If you want a fast package.
- If you want to conserve hard drive space.

If you are looking for a paint/photo package that you can use out of the box and has lots of features then use Paint Shop Pro. If you are looking to learn the industry standard with the most features then learn and use Photoshop.

However I would like to finish this off by saying that I have worked for various multimedia groups that have demanded experience with this package and yet when it came to working for them they used 10% of this package and should have been using Paint Shop Pro instead. If you mention Paint Shop Pro in an interview then the interviewer will look at you sideways. What a load of mumbo-jumbo. They simply use this package because it is the "industry standard" instead of actually looking at a package that suites their needs. If you are an interviewer and someone says they also use Paint Shop Pro then you should actually listen to them for not toeing the official line. You might learn something there that will save you time, money and wasted space. Why bother training people for a couple of months to learn this package when they can do your intermediate tasks on a package they can use out of the box?

That is the bottom line.