The Web Is Yours With This Little Gem (Adobe Photoshop 7.0)

Member Name: liamsquire

Product:	Adobe Photoshop 7.0
Date:	05/03/04 (463 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Edit/Modify photos, Make Websites, Make Superb Images

Disadvantages: Expensive

What a product! Adobe Photoshop 7 can take you from a web designer to a fantastic web designer. Adobe Photoshop is the number one software kit for creating graphics, images, image editing and web design.

I always wondered how people made cool graphics and those amazingly cool websites ? well I found out and it was all the doing of Adobe Photoshop. This is a graphic?s creator or web designers dream. With this product you have hit the jackpot.

► What you get?
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With your Adobe Photoshop product you will get all the usual stuff you will find, CD, manual etc. The important thing is the CD. Your holy grail if you like. You?ll also find Adobe Imageready on the CD. This is another Adobe product that works with Photoshop to make animations and such.

Just pop it in and get the installation under way.

► Is Installation Hard?
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With a happy tone in my voice, installation was a breeze. I have a PC and my operating system is Windows ME. Whether anyone else has found difficulties in installation I?m not sure but I have never heard a complaint about Adobe Photoshop.

Just follow the on screen instructions, which are simple to follow.

► What can you use Adobe Photoshop for?
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There are loads of things you can use Adobe Photoshop 7 for. Here are just a few:
» Creating Graphics
» Web Design Layouts
» Editing Images
» Editing home photos
» Creating skins for applications such as winamp, notepad, etc
» Creating user interfaces for applications or websites
» Create Company Logos and other designs

Adobe Photoshop 7 has many great features. You can make great designs using the superb filters within Photoshop to make things wavy, swirl, blur, pixelated, sharper, clearer, etc. The amount of things you can do is phenomenal. Recently I t
ook a photo of a car and lowered it and added neon lighting at the bottom of the car. I made the car look modified, lowered, and made it look like it had neon lights at the bottom in just a few minutes and the main thing is that you can?t even notice that it was changed using Photo editing software.

The list of uses is endless. It?s just a matter of if you need it. If you?re a budding web designer/graphics designer then I?d say definitely go for it.

► What Else Can I do With It?
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With Above Photoshop you can create a professional image, and export it to other pieces of software to perform animation. I use Abobe Imageready that?s comes with Adobe Photoshop, which is also fantastic.

You can also easily pop your web design or graphic into Macromedia?s Dreamweaver for easy website tweaking / maintenance, etc. If you use Dreamweaver, Photoshop is compatible and they work quite well together.

I personally like to just make the image, slice it into little images and save it as a HTML page where I can manually code my website the way I want it using HTML. Others have their own way such as the Dreamweaver option I mentioned.

► How Much Will It Cost?
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Well this is a big one. It will cost you in and around the region of £400! That?s very expensive for the home user but for the business looking to be modern, that?s not too bad for a fantastic product.

If you find this price tag to large, you can purchase an earlier version of Adobe Photoshop such as 6, which retails in and around £300. This is also expensive but it?s just an example of how much the price drops when you buy an earlier version and in this case its only one version before 7 and there are versions 1-7 so you have a large selection.

Obviously the newer version is going to be more advanced and will prove to be the best buy, buy the earlier
versions will also do a great job for you.

► How Does It Compare With Other Rival Products?
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+ + Simply put, Adobe Photoshop it the best product of its kind on the market. + +

The other major product that rivals Adobe Photoshop 7 is Macromedia?s Fireworks MX. Fireworks is another great product that does a similar job to Photoshop, but it is not quite as good as Photoshop, but this you another option to check out for yourself.

I have both products and I was previously using Fireworks before I discovered how good Photoshop actually was and now all I use is Photoshop. One main advantage is that Photoshop has literally thousands of great tutorials across the Internet whereas Fireworks has fewer and they are harder to find. Photoshop also has more filters that allow you to manipulate your images more.

► Top Tips
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Well, my top tip is when you have Photoshop on your computer, you need to start somewhere, so get yourself a few tutorials of the Internet and get cracking. Within no time you will be making your first creation on Photoshop. Start with the easy / beginner tutorials first.

I would also advise that you get to learn the basics pretty well as Photoshop is a massive piece of software and you can become lost very easily.

Here are a few tutorial sites that you can learn from:

www.good-tutorials.com
http://www.b-man.dk/
http://www.hateralligator.com/index.php
http://www.webclass.ru/top.php

These are just a few and there are hundreds of great sites that you will find. Just type ?Photoshop tutorials? into www.google.com and you will be shown loads of sites.

► Conclusion
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If you are anyway into graphics creation / web design, etc, then this is THE product for you. If you don?t use it, you are already starting from behind the st
arting line. With this you can become at the brink of your industry and be one of the best. Without it, you may just be average. And hands up who wants to be average when you can be a whole lot more. No one? Didn?t think so.

But seriously, this is a great product. If you buy it, do some tutorials that are relevant to you and you were disappointed with Photoshop, I would be extremely surprised to say the least.

Ask advice from other people that use Photoshop on what they think. But before you buy, make sure that you would find a use for it, because it is a lot of money to pay out for something that you may not use.

Anyway, hope this has helped you. If you have any questions, don?t be afraid to ask and I?ll try and help out where ever I can. Liam ☺

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