PHOTOSHOP CONTINUES REIGN WITH LATEST VERSION

As it turns 22 this year, Adobe Photoshop has rightfully earned its place in the pantheon of game-changing applications.

Originally a simple grayscale toning tool developed by graduate student Thomas Knoll under its original name, ImagePro, Adobe Photoshop emerged as an incredible engine that could bend and shape the millions of pixels that a photo comprises and transform them in an infinite number of ways, limited solely by the user's imagination.

Joining a small handful of programs that have become everyday verbs -- we Google facts, Tweet messages and Photoshop images -- Adobe Photoshop lets us perform magic.

A friend of mine once complained that "Photoshopping" is wrong because the results aren't "real." Although Photoshop certainly can be used to blatantly fabricate images -- Newsweek recently ran a contrived image of questionable taste with a severely bloodied President Obama, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich to convey political battle scars -- the true beauty of Photoshop is its ability to perform minor surgery, nips and tucks, to bring dull or defective photographs to life, and to make good photographs terrific ones.

Certainly, Photoshop should never be used in journalism. But for general photo enthusiasts, the benefits of Photoshop are endless. Take a gray, underexposed image and let Photoshop add sunshine to infuse it with color. Transform a landscape into an impressionist dreamscape, patch a photo filled with scratch marks and make it look like it was taken yesterday. Iron out those wrinkles on Grandpa's mug, remove pimples from a teenage daughter's cheeks, insert an absent uncle into a family reunion photo.

Since film was invented, photographers have manipulated images. They "burned" light areas of an image during processing to bring out more detail and "dodged" dark regions to allow hidden elements to be seen.

They printed images of males on high-contrast photographic paper to emphasize the rugged textures of an unshaven face, while reserving low-contrast paper for softer, flattering skin tones for women. They used telephoto lenses to increase the size of the moon over a quiet ocean and slowed the camera's shutter speed to highlight the motion of a running ball player. These -- and so much more -- can all now be done digitally.

Adobe this month released its 12th iteration of Photoshop, formally called CS6.

It added some new features -- including a cool "content-aware move" tool that will lift an object and place it elsewhere on the photo, patching the vacant spot and seamlessly relocating it -- and boosted the speed of many popular procedures, allowing more image manipulations to be viewed in real time.

Some of my favorite Photoshop features, new and old ones that have been improved, are:

* An improved High Dynamic Range tool lets you blend three images shot in rapid succession, each with a different exposure value, to create an almost surreal, brilliantly colored composite. New adjustments allow for a wider range of effects.

* A new Bokeh blur filter lets you reproduce the attractive effect of surrounding a sharp subject with an exaggerated, blurry surrounding of bubbly, watercolor hues.

* The Spot Healing tool is invaluable for deleting blemishes, obstructions, discolorations and other unwanted artifacts from an image and replacing them with samples of surrounding pixels of the same color, exposure value and texture.

* Filters such as cross-hatch, spatter, pastels, watercolor, each one capable of transforming average images into works of art and beauty.

* The Vibrancy tool removes mist, fog and color casts that blunt images and transforms delicate, light shadings into robust fireworks.

I've been recommending free Photoshop alternatives for years in this column because I know Photoshop's $700 price tag exceeds most of our budgets.

But listen to this: Adobe is offering a beta version - a solid, full-fledged copy but not the final version -- of Photoshop CS6 for free. It'll be good for at least several months, possibly longer, and expire when the official release is posted, at which time you'll need to pay to continue to use it. It's a great chance to familiarize yourself with the world's best photo imaging software.

Grab your free copy at adobe.com.

Credit: Contact Peter Grad at [email protected]