Photoshop 3.0.5 for Windows NT

Image processing is one of the biggest resource-hogs of today's desktop applications. It combines compute-intensive tasks with massive data-handling requirements. It has to digitally filter files from 10KB to more than 100MB in size. These requirements make image processing one of the top contenders among applications that could benefit from multiple-CPU support. Until recently, you could run image-editing products on multiprocessor Windows NT systems, but the products weren't multithreaded and couldn't take advantage of the additional processing resources available in NT. Now, Adobe Photoshop version 3.0.5 adds multithreading to an already extensive list of capabilities.

Photoshop has been a standard in the desktop publishing industry for several years. However, it has been used mostly on the Mac--historically the leader in the desktop graphics market. When the PowerPC-based Macs arrived, their superior performance further enhanced Apple's leadership in this niche. The 486 and Pentium systems just couldn't keep up without special accelerators.

The market is changing rapidly: Adobe has shifted its focus from Mac development to NT development to take full advantage of NT's inherent scalability--in terms of both memory and the CPU. With its most recent release, Adobe optimized Photoshop 3.0.5 for 32-bit operations and multiprocessor support. Multiple CPU support is accomplished via "real" multithreaded compute operations, not just task-handling through the operating system. This version of Photoshop is currently available for Intel systems, and a version for the Alpha platform will be out soon. (There hasn't been any word on the development of a PowerPC or MIPS version.) Just imagine running Photoshop on a quad-processor 200-MHz Pentium Pro system with 128MB of RAM!

Because just about anyone who is interested in a new release of Photoshop is probably intimately familiar with its previous feature set, I won't go into gory detail about brush sizes and embossing tools. The program is basically unchanged from 3.0.4 in its tools and user interface, but it's now fully compatible with the Windows 95 GUI. Some of its new features are:

• Improved support for 16-bit plug-ins (such as Kai's Power Tools 2.0 and Andromeda)
• Support for TWAIN_32
• Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) 2.0 object server and drag-and-drop support
• Long filename and Universal Naming Service (UNC) path-name support
• Uninstall capability
• GIF89a export plug-in (with support for transparency and video-interlacing)

New features also include a variety of changes specific to Windows 95, such as common dialog support, the use of system colors and metrics, and right-hand mouse-button support. This could prove to be important, especially if you use Photoshop under the Explorer GUI. Photoshop also includes Win32s 1.30. (Win32s is a subsystem that allows the 16-bit environment of Windows 3.1 to run 32-bit applications.)

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