Smart Filters also have built-in layer masks, just like Adjustment Layers, so you can interactively paint a mask to constrain the effects of your Smart Filters. The advantage of a Smart Filter over a regular filter is that at any time you can hide or delete a Smart Filter to disable or remove its effect, or you can double-click on a Smart Filter to change its parameters. So, for example, you can add an Unsharp Mask filter to a layer to sharpen that layer. With CS3, you can now attach any filter to a layer as a Smart Filter in the same way that Layer Styles are added to a layer. The feature was limited to only a few effects, though, so you still had to think carefully about structuring your documents in multiple layers to constrain your destructive effects.

When Adobe added Adjustment Layers to Photoshop in version 4 in 1996, it introduced the practice of non-destructive image editing to Photoshop. You can also paint a Layer Mask to constrain the effects of your Smart Filters. Smart Filters attach to a layer like a Layer Style. With two docks, each tab collection is roomier. The program still offers the same docking mechanism for nesting palettes together into tabbed collections, but with CS3, the palettes that used to reside in the toolbar have now been moved into a second palette dock that sits next to the original dock on the right side of the screen. By default, the main tool palette is now a single long column of tools, and all the palettes are now bordered by an attractive semi-opaque gray border.

Upon launching, the first thing you’ll notice is the new palette look. …allowing you to better manage your screen space. Macworld Lab is doing more formal benchmarks on the public beta we’ll publish those at shortly. Other operations such as CMYK conversion and resizing with bicubic interpolation were only faster by a second or two. In my tests, sharpen and blur filters were more than twice as fast in CS3 as CS2, and I found that these numbers scale consistently with larger images. Launching is more than twice is fast, clocking in at 20 seconds on my 2GHz MacBook Pro Core Duo, versus 50 seconds for a Photoshop CS2 launch.

Overall, the news is very good: Most operations see a little improvement, and some realize a substantial gain. While the program is loaded with many new features, most users-particularly those who’ve bought an Intel Mac or are contemplating such a purchase-will initially be curious about performance on Mac Pros, MacBook Pros, and other Intel-based machinery. Photoshop’s palette docks are now collapsible to simple buttons…

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