Version 4 of Photoshop Camera Raw includes all of the controls currently found in Lightroom. Fortunately, you can have CS2 and the CS3 beta installed on the same machine with no conflicts. This will be fixed by the time of the release version, but if you depend on precise cursor display for painting and retouching options, you may find that you need to go back to Photoshop CS2 for those features. Precise display is all the current version can manage. On Intel Macs, you wonвЂ™t be able to see your brush size when painting. Be warned however, that in this beta, cursor display is a little buggy. A new Black and White adjustment gives you a 6-channel color mixer, and Brightness & Contrast now performs its adjustments more intelligently-preserving the tonal relationships in your image while making alterations, rather than simply sliding the entire tonal range back and forth. The Curves dialog provides a new Preset feature as well black-and-white point sliders. Many other changes and improvements abound throughout the program. With the new Quick Selection brush, you simply brush on an object in your scene, and Photoshop automatically selects it. The Refine Edges also lets you preview your selection over a variety of backgrounds. In addition, a new Radius slider can often greatly improve the accuracy of your selection.

No matter which selection tools you use, the new Refine Edge palette, which replaces the Feature Selection command and lets you interactively apply feathering to soften the edge of a selection, and expand and contract the selection. While the Quick Selection brush does not select very fine details (blowing hair, for instance) or handle transparency, it can do an amazing job of quickly selecting an object off of a similarly-colored background, something thatвЂ™s difficult to do with PhotoshopвЂ™s other selection tools. As you brush, the program automatically analyzes your image to determine which pixels in the region need to be selected. To ease this task, CS3 adds a new Quick Selection brush, which allows you to select an object by simply brushing over it. Making selections is a big part of many retouching tasks from compositing to localized correction and filtering. Users who do lots of retouching with the Rubber Stamp tool will welcome the new Clone Source palette, which offers the ability to change the clone source numerically, store multiple clone sources, or view the clone source as a semi-transparent overlay over your document The new Clone Source palette offers numeric control over your clone source and the ability to save multiple clone source points. While many effects in Photoshop are still destructive-cropping, mode changes, resizing-the addition of Smart Filters should appease many of the non-destructive desires of Photoshop users whoвЂ™ve been frustrated by the fact that once you apply a filter you canвЂ™t alter or undo it later. 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.

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