Here are my first impressions of the NEW Adobe Photoshop 6.0.
It was with great joy that I received a package in the mail yesterday. I saw the labels, I knew what it was – Adobe had sent me a little bundle of joy and I was thrilled. I always look forward to each update of my favorite image-editing software.
Ripping the box open, I find that Adobe has slightly re-designed the Photoshop 6.0 logo. The eye is still there, but it’s a different eye from before. The rainbow spread within the eye is missing, there’s some leaves and a starfish, and there’s a new arc to signify the new Vector Shape Drawing tools – a la Illustrator. Vector elements are a serious enhancement, finally giving Photoshop artists the ability to create and infinitely scale graphic elements with no loss of quality.
My hands tremble as I open the product box, remove the CD and insert it into my primary workstation – a Dell Precision 420 with dual 733Mhz Pentium III CPU’s, and 1GB of RAM. The installer requests my previous version, so I insert the Photoshop 5.5 disk and away we go.
After about ten minutes and after answering the usual set of questions (serial number, personal identification, install size and location), the installer exits. I reboot the computer and load PHOTOSHOP 6.0 .
Here is the list from Adobe’s website of some of the exciting new enhancements in Adobe Photoshop 6.0 :
• Vector shape drawing with resolution-independent output
• Tighter integration with ImageReady 3.0
• On-canvas text entry and advanced formatting
• Layer styles and new effects
• Image warping and distortion
• Interface enhancements including a new context-sensitive tool options bar and preset manager
• Extensive PDF workflow including shared PDF annotations
The first thing I did was click the ‘eye’ in the tools palette. This checks the Internet for any software updates. I recommend you do this at least monthly. No updates were downloaded, so I assume I have the latest and greatest version – complete with patches.
Photoshop 6.0 takes awhile to load, though this is no surprise to me - Photoshop 5.5 always takes awhile to load because of the number of fonts I have on my computer – over 2, 500. The first thing I notice is the slightly changed interface. The options palette has been moved and is now a tool bar underneath the menu, across the top of the screen. This is a great enhancement – allowing me to see and adjust each of the tools as I use them (feather and style of marquee, tolerance, anti-aliasing and contiguous magic wand, brush size and mode of the blur tool, etc). No longer will these important functions be buried under another tabbed window. Also, this tool bar is dock-able, so I can reposition it if need be.
I select ‘Open’ from the ‘File’ menu, and encounter my first problem. Nothing happens. No dialog box opens. I wait, and wait, and wait some more. Finally, after about a minute, up pops the open dialog box. I see a list of files – the samples Adobe includes with Photoshop , and I select one at random. Again, I wait, and wait, and wait. Thinking something must be wrong, I pull up Windows NT Task Manager and check to see what kind of drain Photoshop is putting on my system. My system is pegged – Photoshop is using one hundred percent of my computers resources!
The first file I opened is a rather complex file, and so I closed it and opened up a different file – one that I know is simple. This time, it opens up no problem, but when I try and re-position it on the screen, again the interminable wait!
Over the course of four hours I tried everything I could think of to see if the problem was my computer, or Photoshop 6.0 .
I have an Intense 3D Wildcat 4110 graphics card that has presets for different software packages. I had it set to Lightwave 3D , so I change it to Photoshop - No Change.
I install Version 6.0 on my older, slower Tri-Star Dual 300Mhz, Pentium II with 512MB of RAM, thinking perhaps it was my computer, not Photoshop – It runs even slower, taking over ten minutes to load the sample image.
I change Photoshops’ priority to ‘High’ – No Change.
I remove many of the fonts from my system, and while this helps Photoshop load faster, it doesn’t solve the original problem of freezing during file loading.
Finally, I decide to try and use Photoshop thinking I can live with the slow load times. I see many wonderful new features and enhancements – folders within layers, new layer effects with easier management functions, faster filter effects – but every thirty seconds to two minutes, it would just freeze up, not allowing me to do ANYTHING. During these ‘freeze’ periods, the CPU load from Photoshop would jump to one hundred percent, effectively making it impossible for me to get anything done. There was nothing consistent about these freezes. I couldn’t push one button and always get it to freeze – sometimes it would, and other times it wouldn’t.
I must say that I am extremely disappointed in these results. On the plus side, there are many, many wonderful new enhancements that I am dying to use, but these enhancements don’t do me any good, if I can’t actually use them! Fortunately, installing a new version of any Adobe software package does not remove the older version, so I can easily revert to Photoshop 5.5 while keeping 6.0 installed on my machines.
I am attempting to contact Adobe Technical Support to see if we can sort out these problems. Until these problems are fixed, Adobe Photoshop 6.0 is a waste of money and a waste of time.
UPDATE: Adobe contacted me regarding my ’freezing’ problem to say that ’’It is not anything we encountered while testing Photoshop and is certainly not something with which we would knowingly release a product.’’ They had a few suggestions, and I decided to try a few things of my own. I have identified what I believe the problem to be - in a word, FONTS.
In my testing, I had reduced my fonts from 2, 500 to 750 with no noticeable change. I decided to take that further, and reduced my fonts down to less than 200. This helped speed things up enormously, though I am still experiencing occasional unusual waits (as signified by the wonderful ’hour-glass’ pointer). I would guess these waits are now more related to the powerful new features of Photoshop , and less related to the fonts.
I find this issue to be a very difficult and frustrating one for me. I have such a large amount of fonts, because I actually use them day to day. Very few days go by where I’m not asked to identically match a font to a client’s logo. Without such a large complement of fonts, I would find this difficult if not impossible. I was willing to pay the price of slow load times in Photoshop 5.5 , because I could still actually use the software.
I want to state for the record that I have always trusted Adobe products and feel confident that they take great measures to insure the quality of those products. I will continue to use them because they are quite simply the best products for the job. I would say that this is not necessarily an Adobe problem, Photoshop 6.0 is just not designed to be used in conjunction with a large set of fonts.
Stay tuned for further updates, and hopefully a review on all those wonderful new features in Photoshop 6.0