The question of how many layers a file could have has caused few sleepless nights because it's a lot more likely that one's system would crash or disk space would be exhausted before getting to the point that Photoshop would reject another layer. But there is an answer: 99 is the theoretical maximum, or, rather, it used to be the maximum.

Photoshop 6 shipped in October. High up in the list of new features is the elimination of this dreaded barrier. No longer are we limited to 99! We have been liberated!

Not all that long ago, I bought a software upgrade and, for the first time in my life, trashed it and went back to the previous version. I dropped $110 for Illustrator 7, thought its revised interface as incomprehensible as it was reprehensible, and went back to version 6. This deprived Adobe of upgrade revenue for version 8 as well, let alone this summer's Illustrator 9.

Save a file in Illustrator 9, and if you try to open it in the current version of the leading image-processing program, you get the message shown at right. Send it to a RIP, and a crash is likely. Use its Layers palette, and the layers might reorder. The critical Fill/Stroke commands are unreliable. Placed EPS files come in at the wrong sizes. Picture links vanish. Files and type get corrupted. Repeated freezes are reported. Illustrator 9 is, in short, a thing devoutly to be avoided.

The end of the beginning?

This column is not meant to Adobe-bash; indeed, the development groups at that software giant are so autonomous that Illustrator and Photoshop might as well be products of different companies. Photoshop 6 is a solid upgrade, one that I would recommend that most users purchase. Illustrator 9 has enough provocative new features that I would recommend it, too, if only the program worked.

Something most unusual has begun to happen with upgrades, however, making them much more expensive than they nominally are.

Software companies have become addicted to that upgrade revenue. Adobe asked us for $200 apiece last year for Photoshop 5.5, and now would like $200 more for version 6 and $150 for Illustrator 9. Especially in the case of Photoshop, this represents a colossal amount of revenue.

The problem is, Photoshop is more than 10 years old and Illustrator is nearly 15. That distinguishes them from pure Web applications, which are relatively new. A young product usually has flaws that don't become obvious until users have a lot of experience with it. In something much older, one seldom finds things that really and truly need fixing. But because upgrades need to be sold, features must be added. They tend by necessity to be features that benefit only a few users, such as the elimination of the 99-layer limit.

Worse, as the programs become more complex, they become less manageable from the coding point of view, and disastrous bugs become more likely. Illustrator 9 is the extreme case, but it's only the culmination of a trend.

Some upgrades are better than others, but to have one so bug-infested as to be nearly worthless is unheard of, or at least, it used to be. But in the last three years, we've had three, from three different vendors: Quark 4.0 in 1997, StuffIt 5 in 1999, and now Illustrator 9. Even Web-oriented products aren't immune: Adobe's recent GoLive 5.0, although not the insectarium that Illustrator 9 is, still has enough problems that macintouch.com, a respectable authority in these matters, advised, "We are not talking about bugs that were in 4.0 but not fixed. We are talking about new (and often quite serious) bugs introduced in 5.0 ... Yes, several readers have offered workarounds ... [b]ut this is not sufficient for us to feel comfortable using GoLive 5.0 in its present version. We are hopeful that most of these bugs will be fixed ... In the meantime, we recommend avoiding GoLive 5.0. Getting its improvements is not worth putting your data at risk."

The entomology of Photoshop

It's a bad idea to starve Photoshop 6 of RAM. A reasonable minimum is 128mb. Abide by that, and my experience with beta versions is that the program runs smoothly, although there are a couple of gotchas in the wings, as well as a problematic interaction with Mac OS 9, which Adobe blames on Apple and Apple no doubt blames on Adobe.

There's nothing in the upgrade of such universal utility as the multiple undo introduced in Photoshop 5. But there are enough worthwhile things that most people will want to upgrade, even though not everyone is helped by every new feature.

For me, but probably not for you, the killer addition is a command called Convert to Profile. This enables one to convert from one colorspace to another, or even from CMYK to CMYK, using traditional Photoshop menus.

This doesn't sound like much, but expert retouchers often change separation settings for a single image, opting for a nonstandard GCR, a different dot gain, or unusual black or total ink limits.

In Photoshop 5, one had to do this in CMYK Setup, which had a downside for those oblivious as I am. Namely, one would forget to change the setting back afterward, with lethal results for the next job. Convert to Profile, which is strictly a one-shot deal, eliminates this problem. The basic setting never changes.

There are more eyecatching features, but they fall in the same category: chances are, you don't need them, but if you're one of those who do, you'll be very happy indeed; each feature alone might well justify the entire upgrade.

I count 10 such features in Photoshop 6, not all of which will be discussed here. Exceeding 99 layers isn't included, but the sophisticated layer-handling options are. There are new effects (and effects can now be combined), easier ways to group layers, and what amounts to style sheets for future layers. These additions will be a godsend to those who often have to stack up lots of layers.

Features for the few

It's characteristic of recent upgrades for all programs to start to resemble one another. Illustrator's type tools, for example, have become strong enough to consider it a page layout application; the only thing that stops it from being considered this is an artificial limit of one page per job, and we can even get around that with an inexpensive plug-in from Hot Doors.

Similarly, as you might expect, Photoshop 6 adds new features that one would normally associate with programs such as Illustrator or QuarkXPress. Photoshop 6 type can have style sheets. And a shape tool has been added, enabling us to create ellipses, polygons, and various others.

This doesn't sound like much either—the specialized programs are still incomparably better at this. But in real life, it's a hot item. Not so much because we no longer have to go to the other programs for simple effects, but because Photoshop 6 enables us to output files that are simultaneously raster and vector.

Let me put that into English. Typesetting programs such as Quark or InDesign and illustration apps such as Illustrator or FreeHand output files with no specific resolution. They are mathematical descriptions that output devices will interpret optimally. It doesn't matter whether the output is going to be 2x3 inches or 20x30 inches.

Photoshop, on the other hand, is traditionally a pixel editor. Its images do have a fixed resolution.

This causes no problem with typical pictures. But if for some reason a picture has to intersect with type or some kind of line graphic, it can become very awkward.

Type doesn't have to be resolution-independent, but if we assign a resolution to it (as we would have had to do in every past version of Photoshop), type as smooth as that on this page would require at least six times the resolution of the pictures.

That sad fact has eliminated many design elements such as the bugs and shadows against the rounded box and type in the print version of the magazine. If this entire graphic is made in previous versions of Photoshop, it has to be at very high resolution. Six times normal resolution means a file size 36 times as large as usual. In this case, that would be right around 250mb.

The alternative—exporting the individual bugs with clipping paths and pasting them on top of graphics made elsewhere—is a pain to execute, particularly because of the shadows. Scitex systems have always been able to make this kind of effect easily, but until now, it's been a major pain in Photoshop.

The solution—and I think it's the biggest advance in Photoshop 6—is to save the pictures as they always have been, but to save the line graphics as resolution-independent vectors.

Imitation is the sincerest form

The most obvious Photoshop 6 change is shown above. Toolbox options now live in a menu bar at the top of the screen, as opposed to floating palettes.

Although this menu bar is more efficient, it doesn't make my list of compelling reasons to buy. But one component of it does. We can now change the position of an image element by typing in numbers, as has long been the case in, for example, Quark's measurements palette. So, if something needs to move four points to the right, we can move it that precise amount, as opposed to the by-guess-and-by-gosh method of dragging it somewhere close with the mouse.

The new bar is a bow in the direction of Corel PhotoPaint, which has had something similar for years. To the extent that Photoshop's stranglehold on the professional market has competition, it's PhotoPaint—although not if you read Adobe's press releases.

Those releases indicate that Adobe does recognize that there's competition, but from a program that has had simultaneous vector-raster output for a while now, Macromedia's Web graphics program, Fireworks.

As unlikely as this comparison seems, it reflects a valid concern: in the Web world, Adobe is getting its clock cleaned by Macromedia's suite of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and, especially, Flash. Adobe's competitor to Flash, LiveMotion, showed up way too late. That segment of the market is now gone forever.

GoLive, which competes with Dreamweaver, has more of a chance. And Photoshop, or more accurately the ImageReady module of Photoshop, is a potent competitor to Fireworks.

The difficulty is, the Macromedia Web apps mesh well. The Adobe suite members have some difficulty working with each other—or in some cases working at all.

The beginning of the end?

Adobe was quite tardy in realizing this threat. Even as late as mid-1998, when Photoshop 5.0 came out, ImageReady was a separate application. Processing Web images does require features not needed in the print world (such as, being able to slice a graphic into segments of differing resolution, something that Photoshop 6 does rather well).

Pictures are nevertheless pictures, which is why Adobe elected to kill ImageReady as a separate product and instead crowbar it into Photoshop 5.5. The union was quite clunky. Photoshop 6 integrates ImageReady a bit better, but there is still the flavor of their separate pasts. Improving this will be a priority for Photoshop 7.

Which brings up the questions that now must be asked of all upgrades: when, why, and how stable?

In late October, Tim Gill, the co-founder of Quark and main architect of QuarkXPress, left the company. There is still talk of a Quark 5.0 one of these days, but the firm has not demonstrated recently the capability to write functional code. Quark 4.1, the current version, more or less does the job, but it took several maintenance upgrades following the disastrous 4.0. Probably the majority of professionals still use 3.3, which if true is astounding, considering that no one has been able to buy 3.3 for the last three years.

Mr. Gill's departure calls Quark's future competence into question even further, if possible. Meanwhile, what are we to make of the Illustrator 9 experience? It looks to me as though both Illustrator and GoLive were rushed into release for competitive reasons without adequate testing.

It doesn't take much to make an upgrade worth $200 to a professional. What turns people away is the thought of tens of thousands of dollars of damage caused by software that would challenge a professor of entomology, such as Quark 4.0 and Illustrator 9, or that has devastating interface changes, such as Illustrator 7 and Photoshop 5.

I take nothing away from responsible upgrades like Illustrator 8, Flash 4 and 5, FreeHand 8 and 9, Photoshop 6, or even InDesign 1.5. But in a frightening proportion of recent upgrades, one can practically hear the barking coming from inside the package.

I am not being old and crotchety about this, either. It's a new phenomenon. Until 1997, there was perhaps one upgrade, FreeHand 4, as poor as some of the ones mentioned here. But now, we seem to have companies too hungry for income and too quick to release the upgrades that are too complex for their programmers to code.

So, forget Illustrator 9, but buy Photoshop 6.

The question is, with all this garbage floating about, do you dare trust me? Do you really want to be the first one on the block to experiment with any upgrade?

This is a question that a lot of software executives should be asking themselves, before they commit to eliminating a 99-layer limit in another 18 months.

Contributing editor Dan Margulis' Professional Photoshop 6 is now available. He can be reached at DMargulis@aol.com. For information on his color-correction tutorials in Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans, call Sterling Ledet & Associates at 877/819-2665.