Stay competitive

Photoshop 7.0 delivers new and enhanced tools to help you achieve your creative best. Experiment with sophisticated painting effects and patterns to turn your ideas into images that stand out.

New paint engine

Create and save custom brushes with a powerful new paint engine that lets you adjust dozens of different brush settings--including size, shape, tilt, spacing, scatter, and jitter--to get precisely the effect you want. You can even simulate different canvas and paper textures. See Working with brushes and About brush dynamics (Photoshop).

Art studio brushes

In addition to the brushes you create yourself, you can use the preset brushes included on the Photoshop CD to simulate traditional wet and dry brush painting techniques to duplicate the fine-art effects such as charcoal or pastel. There are also special brushes for effects such as grass and leaves. See Selecting preset brushes.

Pattern Maker

Simply make a selection and apply the Pattern Maker plug-in to generate abstract patterns or realistic textures such as sand or rocks. The plug-in performs a sophisticated analysis of your selection to avoid repetition and seamlessly tile the image. Use the patterns to create compelling Web backgrounds, enhance printed or on-screen artwork, or produce unique new imagery in combination with the painting engine. See Generating patterns.

Liquify enhancements

The enhanced Liquify plug-in gives you greater control over image warping with zoom, pan, and multiple undo. You can also save your meshes, which lets you return to an image after experimenting with the Liquify tools and start where you left off. Or apply the same mesh to different images; experiment on a low-resolution image, for example, and then apply the mesh to a high-resolution version. Create effects such as smoke or fire with the new Turbulence brush. Use the new backdrop option to view individual layers or a flattened version of the file so that you can see your distortions in context as you create them. See Using the Liquify command.