Adobe Ships Photoshop 7.0


Adobe has commenced shipping its OS X-native version of Photoshop.

In an apparent oversight not unlike the Time Canada cover story on the LCD iMac released hours before its official announcement, Mac-related print magazines were covering the Photoshop release as early as Friday. However, Adobe has made Photoshop 7.0 an open secret as far as the feature set and screen shots are concerned, with tests by PC Magazine and others well in advance of its release. MacWorld covered Photoshop in its February 2002 issue.

The big news is that Adobe is actually shipping it - originally the company had stated a second quarter shipment, and they have delivered.

Adobe touts the 'healing brush', a tool to cover and repair blemishes or errors as the big new feature of 7.0. The powerful multiprocessing environment of OS X is also taken advantage of by Photoshop 7.0.

Adobe's online store lists version 7.0 at $609 with upgrades from any version (same platform only) for $149. Adobe also offers discounted pricing on Premiere for purchasers of Photoshop 7.0.

Analysis: For a lot of pros, Photoshop, together with Go Live, Illustrator, Final Cut 3.0, DVD Studio Pro and Cleaner puts the final icing on the OS X cake. This delivers to the core of Apple's professional graphics market and forcefully emphasizes that OS X is the future and that OS 9 apps - the major ones anyway - are drying up fast. Microsoft will no longer do anything but maintenance updates for OS 9, while print and publishing only wait for Quark to gets its act together.