Adobe Upgrades

The programmers and marketing people at Adobe have been busy working on enhancements to their major DTP applications. With a lot less hoop-la than their cousins at Corel they have recently released Photoshop Version 4 and Pagemaker 6.5 for the PC. A bit of a first here by the way, the PC version of Pagemaker actually shipped before the Mac one, certainly a turn around from tradition there.

Contrary to our assumptions, even though it's not an integer jump in version numbers Pagemaker 6.5 is much more than a bug fix/maintenance release.

Probably the most significant change is the document wide layering system - how many times have Pagemaker users gone through amazing contortions to select an object that was obscured by others in front, or had to develop skills rivalling David Copperfield's when working on complicated layouts that required a change of the object stacking order after accidentally bringing an object to the front when it was being nudged a bit! Well those days are gone, you can now assign objects to layers and change layer orders and switch them on or off at will, making many tasks much less painful.

The whole user-interface has had a work over too, making it less Aldus and more Adobe-like. Seasoned Photoshop users will love it!

PM6 also has a number of enhancements to help convert your files to electronic documents such as WWW pages.

Photoshop 4 has a number of new features, the most useful of which is probably `Actions', which allows easy recording of the steps in opening, adjusting and closing an image file, so that you can set it running on a batch of images while you go out for coffee. (Now, that's an upgrade!)

Adjustment layers are another nifty feature which allows you to make changes to all sorts of settings without penalty if you change your mind. Normally Photoshop would only let you undo the last change you made, but now you can try all sorts of effects through an adjustment layer (or layers!) without "wrecking" your image, the adjustment layers can be turned on or off or deleted at any time. Rulers and guidelines have been added to aid in accurate positioning of elements, and a new navigator palette allows quick access to different sections of an image at different magnifications. The program has also been enhanced to take advantage of the new Intel MMX chip and Adobe claim speed increases of up to six times for some operations if an MMX chip is available.

If you have already purchased Pagemaker 6.5, you may also want to obtain a patch kit to Version 6.51 from Adobe's WWW site which fixes up a few bugs relating to the Windows version of PM6.5.