No matter how you like to work, or play, with pictures — managing the family photo album, the school science project, the company Website, or bringing old images and memories back to life, there’s a lot to get genuinely excited about in the new Adobe Photoshop 7.0. The newest release of the world standard for image editing software is a major upgrade and professional multimedia and digital imaging gurus as well as prosumers (jargon for serious hobbyists) have been panting for it. Photographers, start your engines.

One of the smaller, but not least intriguing, innovations is a spell-checker. You’re not about to start writing letters home inside of the world’s leading image-manager, but it makes practical sense. If, for example, you have added text to an image or a caption that you intend to dump into an article such as this one, you can check the spelling in Photoshop so that the editor doesn’t think you can’t spell. Kewl.

Perhaps the most impressive of the new tools is the Healing Brush, an amazing tool that revolutionizes retouching images by wiping out dust, scratches and other blemishes. It’s possibly the coolest thing Adobe has ever done in Photoshop — just slightly astonishing when you see it in use. You can literally wipe the wrinkles from the face of Grandma Moses and take decades off her age. The brush is easy to use and, by mathematically averaging the color density of pixels in the immediate area, it automatically preserves the shading on the image. A related Patch Tool allows you to select areas to work on with the Healing Brush.

The most important innovation in version 7.0 is an all-new file browser, aimed especially at the increasing number of professional and amateur photographers using digital cameras. It’s rather like a more sophisticated version of Apple’s nifty iPhoto that comes free with every Macintosh. Photoshop’s file browser provides thumbnails that allow you to search for images visually, whether they have been imported from a scanner or a digital camera or are stored on your hard drive or on a CD. Think of it as a built-in virtual lightbox.

You can quickly rename images and get rid of those weird alpha-numeric tags that many cameras give them and you can sort, rotate, reorder into batches and rank your images, all pretty much with the click of a mouse button and a few keystrokes.

Like all the other major Adobe packages, Photoshop 7.0 is fully Web-aware. Included on the Photoshop CD is ImageReady 7.0, a separate and complementary program that optimizes images for the Internet. For example, you can make Web page elements transparent simply by clicking on the color you want to knock out, and you can reduce file sizes by marking areas of your image for higher or lower quality.

Other new features include an Auto Color Command, which, Adobe says, gives more reliable color correction than was possible in earlier versions of Photoshop. There’s also a new painting engine allowing application of special textures, such as grass and leaves, in pastel or charcoal with either wet or dry brush effects. It’s never been easier to take a photograph and instantly transform it into a faux masterpiece of illustrated or painterly art.

For the secutiory-minded, support for Adobe Acrobat 5.0 security settings is now included in Photoshop 7.0, allowing passwords to be added to PDF files before putting images online.

The Liquefy plug-in has been enhanced to give greater control over image warping and a new Turbulence brush has been added to mix up the pixels in an image to make fire, smoke and similar effects.

Photoshop has grown up as a professional tool and many of its features require a modicum of learning, but, just as nobody uses all of the features in Microsoft Word, so too, can you use Photoshop’s basic toolset without having to be a brain surgeon. Thousands of hobbyists have come to know and love Photoshop as vastly preferable to the primitive stuff you get bundled with digital cameras and scanners.

• Product: Adobe Photoshop 7.0
• List Price: $609; upgrade, $149
• Requires: Mac OS 9 or later or Pentium III processor or better; 128MB RAM; 280MB hard disk space; Microsoft Windows 98, 98 SE, ME, NT (with Service Pack 6a), 2000 (with Service Pack 2), or XP.
• Company Info: Adobe Systems Inc., 800-724-4508, www.adobe.com.