Last night, I attended a Photoshop Users Group meeting at Adobe, where they previewed Adobe Photoshop CS2. Can you believe that Photoshop has been around for 15 years now? I still remember using PS2 back before layers support!
There were over 150 people at the event, of which 75 people who RSVP’ed. This meant all of the pizza that had been purchased for the event was gone by the time that I arrived 15 minutes before the start of the meeting! I was really looking forward to that pizza because I had just come back from exercising!
John Nack, along with members of Photoshop’s engineering team, went through a list of features and enhancements to the program. Some of the ones that I noted included:
- Customizable menus. You can hide, display, and colorize menu items, but you cannot reorder them
- WYSIWYG font menu. The menu displays the name of the font followed by a sample of the font. This font menu is in PS CS2 and InDesign CS2, but not in Illustrator CS2
- Layers. You can now select and perform operations such as
text resizing and alignment over multiple layers. - HDR (High Dynamic Range) brings support for 32-bit images to Photoshop. You can merge multiple exposures of a scene to create a an image with more dynamic range than your monitor can display
- Smart objects. Vector and raster images can be embedded in your Photoshop files. Basically, PS creates a copy of the image with which you can resize, reshape, etc. without any loss of image quality. Even RAW images can be made into smart objects. If you don’t like the way the image was processed, you can double-click on it to bring up the Camera RAW dialog
- Lens correction. Don’t have a tilt-shift lens? Want to correct pincushioning or barrel distortion in your images? This filter will become your best friend!
- Spot healing brush. Automatically chooses the sampling area
Nack and crew also demonstrated Adobe Bridge, the cross-application replacement for Photoshop’s File Browser. They made a point to say that it wasn’t a replacement for iView or Portfolio. Rather, they explained, Bridge is meant to be your funnel or front-end to your workflow. From the second you insert your memory card, you can use Bridge to rename, sort, and rate your files. Since it doesn’t support viewing of offline images, I suspect many in the crowd will still use a program like iView.
When I left around 8:45 pm, they were still going over the feature list. I wished they would have covered the improvements to Camera RAW. I’m curious to see if the RAW processing algorithms have improved. I don’t use Camera RAW that much, primarily because I really hate its treatment of shadows and shadow detail/noise.
tow.com 
I don’t like RAW either, but because Canon keeps changing it from camera to camera. Canon moved from RAW to now CR2. Geeeeeees….Louise, what’s next! I had to upgrade from PS7 to CS. A lot of $$$ for CS!
RAW converter program provided by Canon was a pain in the neck too, not to mention it’s craaaaawling speed. Well, my new Canon was shipped with the professional RAW converter CD, which I haven’t tried. I hate to install a thousand software pieces on my computer.
Recently, out of curiosity, I bought PS Elements 3.0 from CostCo and tried it. Oh, I love it’s quick and effective shawdow/highlight adjustment. It works like a charm! Elements 3.0 reads CR2 too! Of course, the “Organizer” was a piece of junk that is so difficult to use.
Also, I’ve been trying Smugmug…where my trial period will expire tomorrow. My addy is alexaye.smugmug.com.
I don’t use RAW because I haven’t found any software I like that supports it. The bundled Nikon stuff was nothing short of craptastic, and iPhoto 5.0 converts RAWs to JPEGs (oy!).
dcraw looks very interesting. ahve you tried it?
those who are in the graphics business could never live without Adobe Photoshop.”`;