We have come to rely on Adobe for the majority of our graphics and page layout work. We are not alone, tens of millions of other people do – be they professional artists and designers or just people who need to do some graphic, photoediting or design work. Indeed, for many, Adobe represents the de facto standard to which just about everyone else aspires.

 Of all the Adobe products, this is more true of its Photoshop editing program than any other. Stop by a book store, search for assistance on the web, look in designers' cubicles and you will find Photoshop.

 Being the standard-bearer takes its toll, however. It isn't easy to be on the top of the world. And the biggest knock on Photoshop in recent years has been its relative lack of tools for web development.

 Adobe most recently addressed this issue with the release of its Image Ready and Image Styler software. But the programs, while excellent, were stand-alone. The drill was to develop the graphics in Photoshop, save them, and then open Image Styler, load the Photoshop file and then optimize and animate.

 The problem was, of course, that Photoshop could not animate and optimize and Image Styler did not have all Photoshop's tools. It could be frustrating.

 No longer.

 In Photoshop 5.5, although operating as separate programs, Photoshop and Image Styler are linked together. A click of a single button not only switches between them, but it also transfers the image from one to the other. In addition, a limited "save for the web" optimization engine has been incorporated directly in Photoshop itself. If what you want to do is design a graphic for the web, you can do the whole thing in Photoshop, optimize in Photoshop and crank up your FTP program to upload it.

 Truth be told, were this single enhancement be all that was incorporated into Photoshop itself, it would be worth the upgrade. However, there is far more.

 Photoshop 5.5 sports two new tools: a background eraser and a magic eraser. Both are much needed because one of the most time-consuming jobs anyone will get into in Photoshop is extracting a part of an image.

 The magic eraser allows you to automatically erase all similar pixels to transparency in any layer. A nice feature is to allow you to erase only contiguous pixels or all pixels on the layer which match the criteria (your tolerance value) you set. You can also set the strength of the erasure: 100 percent yields a complete erase, 50 percent is a half-and-half erase. Other options such as allowing you to erase on all visible layers and to anti-alias the erasure make this an excellent too. Nifty.

 The background eraser addresses a function which many third party software add-ins have made available for some time. It erases backgrounds while leaving the main part of your picture for further editing. It is an excellent implementation of this important ability. Basically, you tell the background eraser what colors are in the part of the image you want to get rid of and what colors are in the part you want to keep and then erase away.

 Because getting rid of backgrounds is so time-intense, Photoshop also has added an extract command. This is very nice. Essentially, you highlight the edges of the object you want to extract, define the part of the image you want to keep and then extract. You preview the extraction before it takes place, allowing you to refine the area as much as you want. For objects which are especially intricate or do not have a very clear interior, you can use a "force foreground" function.

 The new art history brush is rather unique. It allows you to paint with stylized strokes from a previous version of an image. You can then select options for the brush and use them to paint with those options. It is a little complicated to explain, but very effective to use.

 Extremely helpful are several new features which allow you to make contact sheets. picture packages and web image galleries. Picture packages are like those packages you can order from a store: one 4x5, a couple of 3x3s and several "wallet" photos. There are several preset layouts. With the steadily increasing quality of color printers and available papers, this is a welcome addition to the program.

 But it is the web image gallery which is really gee-whiz! A few mouse clicks let you set up thumbnails, an index page and individual image pages with navigable links. Photoshop writes the HTML code. Paste the code into a web page. Done. Cool.

 As always, there are a host of other enhancements to Photoshop such as automatic contrast adjustment, new type options and more help for transparency options.

 All this is well worth the upgrade. But it is only part of the Photoshop 5.5 package.

 Both the Photoshop and Image Ready components share the optimization ability and do it extremely well. You can view your original file with the optimized file, or, even, view three different optimization settings with the original image! When the size-versus-quality issue is important (and isn't it always?) this part of the program is a major boon.

 Additionally, Photoshop now lets you, in effect, have transparent JEPG files with a background matting option. So long as the background of your web page is a solid color, you can set the "transparent" areas of the JPEG to that color, much the same way you specify transparency in a GIF file. This is excellent since often you will get better compression from a JPEG than a GIF.

 Photoshop's Image Ready component really shines when it comes to animation! I have been animating GIF files for what seems like centuries, and this is the easiest component I have ever seen. Photoshop uses both an animation palette and a the familiar layers palette working together to do animations. Because all the animation components are always available in the program, this means you can loop back "to the start" of an animation easily rather than just jumping from the end to the beginning.

 Photoshop also tweens. All this means is that you do not have to draw every version of an animation. Put an object in one place in one frame, move it to another in a second and tell Photoshop to make the frames inbeTWEEN. Walt Disney would have loved this program!

 Animated GIF files are not the only way you can have "movies" on your web pages. Photoshop will import movies in AVI, MOV, FLIC and PICT format and export the finished product in those formats as well as QuickTime files. And the best yet? You can optimize your animated files as well!

 Finally, Photoshop has an excellent range of new and specific web design features, including image slicing, rollovers and image maps. One of the neatest things about all of this is you can optimize individual slices of an image differently: this can save some valuable bandwidth.

 The rollovers will allow you to display animations in the rollover state or to display an image from another part of the page. We've seen a lot of programs do similar things and then flunk when you had to actually integrate the graphics and functions into a web page. Not with Photoshop: it writes the HTML code for you. Cut and paste. It is that simple.

 You must couple all this new technology and ease of use with Photoshop's vaunted feature set as well as the huge number of plug-ins which are available for the product. The bottom line is obvious: no matter what else you may buy for image editing and web use, buy Photoshop first.

Connect to the Adobe web site.