Re: [APML] Picture Window Pro vs. PhotoShop

[Philip Perkins <philip@astrocruise.com>]

I'm one of those who tries to resist the continuous pressure to 
upgrade.  Adobe need the revenue stream is basically what it boils down 
to.  The only reason I upgraded to version 6 was a fear that if I let my 
4.01 get too far out of date it would cost a bomb to eventually upgrade to 
something I actually wanted.

Now here's an interesting confession: having played around with Photoshop 6 
to a large degree I have gone right back to Photoshop 4.01.  Photoshop 6 
has nothing extra that I actually need and Photoshop 4.01 is *much* 
quicker, cleaner, and easier to use for the vast majority of 
operations.  There are whole assortment of things that are easier to use, 
especially the tool set, eg the rubber stamp tool.  I don't know who dreamt 
up the way of doing it in Photoshop 6 - it is much more cumbersome and time 
consuming to use.  Photoshop 4.01 loads much faster and its handling of 
very large images is much better.  It doesn't have the "history" function 
but I never use that - I save incremental revsions while I work.

Now of course the 16 bit handling in Photoshop 4.01 is very limited, but 
that's of no consequence because I never do any 16 bit processing in 
Photoshop anyway!  Why not?  Well, if I'm scanning film images, and I have 
scanned them properly, then there is nothing to be gained by the extra 8 
bits.. and with most scanners the images are already in 8 bit by the time 
that Photoshop opens them (unless the scanner can handle the *full* 16 bits 
then anything above 8 bits is thrown away anyway).  The only exception to 
this might be Tech Pan images, though I'd still say that it is better to 
let the scanner handle the dynamic range and present Photoshop with a 
properly adjusted 8 bit image - Photoshop is a poor place to do 16 to 8 bit 
conversion (see below).

CCD images absolutely do need to be processed as 16 bit (or even 32 bit) 
images.  However the packages for CCD processing are much better at doing 
that job than Photoshop, especially MaximDL (which I use) and Mira.  Hence 
I do all 16/32 bit processing using MaximDL, which is designed for the job, 
then convert images to 8 bit as a final step *within* MaximDL.  In MaximDL 
you have much more control over the 8 bit conversion - you can see what you 
are doing and make adjustments so that it has exactly the right effect on 
the histogram and the image.  Photoshop is a poor place to do conversion 
from 16 bit to 8 bit because the process is automatic and you can't control 
what it is doing to the image.

Hence I ensure that all my data is 8 bit before I ever start work on it in 
Photoshop.  And as we know, 8 bits is all that is needed for any image to 
be viewed by the human eye, by whatever medium.  16 or 32 bits is needed 
only for internal data manipulation of certain images but by the time the 
image gets to the presentation stage anything greater than 8 bits is wasted.

--Philip


At 20:38 03/10/02 -0400, you wrote:
>You still can't.  The only thing I noticed in Photoshop 7 was the bandaid 
>function
>which is like a smart rubberstamp.  I believe that there was not a single 
>additional
>16bit function added.  I cannot understand why there is not more demand for
>at least the 16bit masking function.



Philip Perkins - philip@astrocruise.com
Wiltshire UK & Luberon France
Astrocruise - http://www.astrocruise.com


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