« Final Gather Rim Light | Main | Painting with Photoshop »
April 21, 2005
Photoshop CS2 initial impressions
I got ahold of a 30-day tryout version of Photoshop CS2 that Adobe released after the NAB Convention in Las Vegas, and I took it for a spin.
Anyone who follows Photoshop is no doubt aware of many of the impressive new improvements to CS2. Rather than go into those in any detail, (especially since it will be in wide release any day now), I'd like to just convey my initial impressions of the software.
First of all, not much has changed with regard to layout and useability (except subtly for the better). If you got along okay in Photoshop CS, you'll intuitively grasp CS2 just fine.
If you have a problems with red eye in your family snapshots, you'll be glad to know that you no longer need to struggle with a complicated Photoshop workflow (or resort to Google's Picassa program!) to deal with this problem. The new CS2 red eye remover works great. Touch in the general vicinity of the red eye and it's gone. (If you look at the letter "O" in the word Adobe in the image above, you'll see that I was having a little fun misusing the red-eye remover on the red text.)
If you hated the quirky way Photoshop CS handled type, you'll also be happy to learn that CS2 seems to have solved the weird update and display issues that made editing text such a pain in the past.
The Bridge looks pretty cool. It seems easy to use, and it lets you preview and play Quicktime movies, too. I think I'm going to like it.
Support for the rotation parameter and the new Wacom 6D Art Pen seems buggy and poor. The pen "runs out of ink" for some reason. The programmers also don't seem to get the point of the art pen. Regardless of whether you use the face or edge of the digital marker's tip, you get the same fat lines if you hold your wrist one way, and the same thin lines if you hold it the other way. Painter IX's support for this accessory, though not perfect, seems better than Photoshop CS2's. I hope I'm wrong about this, or if I'm right, I hope that they fix it quickly. I was looking forward to playing around with this pen.
The Help Menu functionality looks much fuller. I was occasionally appalled in the past to find certain common topic keywords returning no hits at all from the help documentation.
The HDR interface looked easy to understand. I came across that while looking for the Contact Sheet II batch process, and I can't wait to play around with it. Ditto the lens distortion and vignetting fixers.
I'm glad the tryout period lasts 30 days. Long before that time elapses, the official product should be on sale and shipping. Consider me already in line for my upgrade.
Posted by digital artform at April 21, 2005 11:52 PM