The whisper of a new version of Photoshop gets professional photographers and illustrators very excited.

It is, after all, the industry-standard bitmap editing package found in pro photographic and design studios the world over. In fact, the term ‘Photoshopped’ has near entered the English language as an adjective for images manipulated on computer.

Photoshop CS, aka v8.0, arrived in 2003 and was followed up by CS2 in 2005. Both offered improvements to Raw file handling, various ‘smart’ features to help speed workflow, and the expected raft of other new gadgetry aimed at creating a more flexible virtual darkroom and image-creation tool.

But the worries associated with each successive version are whether or not Adobe has bloated the software with needless widgets, or changed it so radically as to render the software unfriendly.

Although we’re working with beta code here (the actual launch is months away) first impressions suggest there’s no call for alarm. CS3 now runs on Intel Macs, while enhancements have been made to its Windows performance, resulting in slightly faster start-up compared with CS2.

In keeping with designs for all other CS programs, Photoshop’s interface has received a facelift, with tools appearing in a single column at left and the palette well at right having disappeared. The palettes can be placed at the left or right of the screen and collapsed to free up screen space, while an icon column by the palettes offers quick access to various tool functions.

Camera Raw is now at v4.0 and brings with it Recovery and Fill Light adjustment for better management of shadows and highlights, while the new Vibrance adjuster does a good job of increasing saturation without introducing too much noise.

There are also new black and white toning controls, but mono conversion is better handled by the immensely capable Black & White adjustment layer, which provides channel-mixer like control over CMYK/RGB values and flexible tint application. Filters can also be applied non-destructively via Smart Filters, which converts layers into a Smart Object. Any subsequent filter modifications remain fully editable.

The Curves dialog has also received significant attention. You’ve a live histogram for each channel to show the effect of your adjustments, along with a Show Clipping option that displays areas where things have been taken too far. Brightness/Contrast has also been upgraded to reduce the incidence of clipping, although it can be switched back to old-style operation.

Those engaged in carving up bitmaps for composites and cut-outs are catered for by a new Quick Selection tool which, rather like the Magic Wand, analyses a sampled areas and attempts to select similar pixels, as well as a Refine Edges feature that is used to contract, expand, smooth and feather selections.

New Clone Source options enable you to sample from multiple source points on single or multiple layers, Auto Align and Auto Blend Layers aims to help you produce more accurate composites and updates to Photomerge and Vanishing Point aim to make stitching image elements together that much more seamless.

Bridge has also been given a shake-down, although its market position is in question with Lightroom (also still in beta) lurking in the wings. Bridge 2.0 is certainly quick to update its thumbnails and now features a dark grey background for clearer image preview. However, the lightning fast Lightroom is still the preferred tool.

This is, as mentioned, a beta release and there are numerous known issues, listed at Adobe Labs, hence it shouldn’t be used for critical applications. Nor should it be given a full evaluation at present. Suffice to say that the numerous new features, of which there are too many to mention here, will be welcomed by photographers seeking more control over Raw files, colour tone adjustments and mono manipulation.

Whether Quick Selection, Clone tool enhancements and Refine Edges will tempt compositors away from favoured tools is as yet debatable, but will be decided before the year is out. Meanwhile, download the Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom betas and draw your own conclusions. Adobe is open to user feedback, so now is the time to help shape this software into the application you want it to be.