NYT: A New Photoshop Makes Retouching Reality (Somewhat) Easier

[DeepModem Mom]

A New Photoshop Makes Retouching Reality (Somewhat) Easier
By DAVID POGUE

Published: May 5, 2005


....Photoshop color-corrects, brightens, darkens, crops, sharpens or airbrushes imperfections from a huge percentage of the photographs you see every day, whether in ads, articles, movies or CD's, on Web sites or the covers of books.

No wonder, then, that when Adobe releases a new version, as it did last week, photographers and designers sit up and take notice....

***

Some of the additions in (Photoshop) CS2 are administrative tools rather than creative ones. One, in particular, is aimed at alleviating the sense of despair you may feel upon first encountering Photoshop's staggering array of 494 menu commands. It's the Edit Menus dialogue box, where you can hide commands you never use and highlight (in color) commands you use most often. You can even switch among sets of edited menus on the fly.

Photoshop also comes with Bridge, an all-new graphics-browsing program that bears an uncanny resemblance to, say, iPhoto from Apple. It looks like a slide sorter, displaying thumbnail versions of all the graphics files on your hard drive. You can rotate or crop them, give them star ratings or text labels, delete the duds, conduct slide shows and so on....

***

....once you designate an area of your artwork as a Smart Object, the rules change. You can shrink that scrap of image at will, without worrying that you won't be able to scale it back up if you change your mind....By far the coolest new feature in Photoshop CS2, though, is called Vanishing Point. It's also the most difficult to describe; in the attempts you find on the Web, you can practically see the knuckle marks on the writers' foreheads....The price for all of this power, online, is $150 for an upgrade, or $550 for the full version....If you use Photoshop on the job...or if you use it more than a couple of times a week, get the upgrade. These bigger tweaks, along with a lot of smaller ones, make CS2 a worthy investment....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/technology/circuits/05pogue.html

[ET Awful]

1. I'll be upgrading my copy next week :)

It has some exceptionally cool features for post-processing of digital images. One of the nicest comes into play if you use bracketing for digital photos. It saves you a LOT of time with layering, doge and burn, etc. so you can expose for shadows, then expose for hilights then combine the two for the best image possible.

It's got some extremely cool new toys :)

[mindfulNJ]

3. sounds like some cool new toys...

but It seems like I just upgraded to CS...It'll have to wait a bit.

[ET Awful]

4. I have CS at work, but never upgraded at home, I have 6.0 at home

so this will be a pretty good leap for the $149 upgrade price :).

[FloridaPat]

2. They're upgrading faster than my pocket book can keep up.