CS2: First Impressions

[photofinish]

I just received my CS2 upgrade, so I have not had a lot of time to play with all of the new features. They do provide you with a training CD with an hour of various demos of the new features. The installation now requires you to go through a product activation process before it completes the install. It has its own serial number as well.

Raw
Detail tab; sharpness (I never knew these were available in the previous version!), luminance smoothing, color noise reduction.
New Curve tab for curves adjustment with four modifiable presets: Linear, like we have seen before, Medium Contrast curve, Strong Contrast curve, or Custom. This did a great job with several of my photos.

New Filters
Lens Correction: select the Filter menu, Distort, Lens Correction.
Has a straighten tool as an icon, draw a line on an edge in the photo which should be straight and it will automatically rotate the picture.
The demo shows a picture of a house with columns in the front that are slanted away from you, bottom to top, due to your perspective and wide angle lens. The Transform slider allows you to move the vertical perspective so that the columns won't tip away from you or toward you and a horizontal slider as well. You then use the crop tool to select your final result.

Noise Reduction: select Filter menu, Noise, Reduce Noise. Similar to what is provided in Raw above.

Smart Sharpen: Filter menu, Sharpen, Smart Sharpen
Very similar to unsharp mask controls (which is still available as a separate menu item), BUT it allows you to take care of a small amount of motion blur. Also, normal blur (Gaussian Blur), Lens blur created by the lens depth of field. The demo showed a portrait of a woman with visible motion blur around the eyes. By selecting the angle of rotation of the blur and the number of pixels that the shift occurred, it was able to correct the blur. They make a point of saying it will only correct for slight motion blur. Very cool though!

Vanishing Point: Filter, Vanishing Point
Allows you to easily clone out distracting objects with healing as a side effect, or copy an object to duplicate it elsewhere in the picture. All of this occurs while it maintains the proper perspective. The demo showed the outside of a house with angled walls. They copied a window with the marquee tool and dragged it to a different angled wall and it maintained its appropriate perspective as you dragged it!

Adobe Bridge
Replaces the file browser in the previous version and is now a standalone product which can be called outside of CS2 or from within. You can easily change the size of the thumbnails with a handy slider at the bottom. Seems a little cumbersome for me till you make your adjustments to it.

New Process
Merge To HDR: File menu, Automate, Merge to HDR
Merge To HDR does its work in 32 bit channels to adjust highlights, shadows. To use this you must have taken a set of pictures. The demo shows seven pictures of the same scene where if you took only one photo, either the highlights or the shadows would be blown out. The feature allows you to select (in the demo) seven photos of the same scene where you used a tripod and controlled all other camera settings except for exposure. You start with an exposure that would be ideal for the shadows and work your way in increments till your last shot exposes for the highlights. THEN you take all these photos into the Merge and change whatever sections of the composite you want, all in 32 bit so you lose very little color information. When your merge is complete, you finish your adjustments as you normally might.

If you already are happy with any plugins you have, like for sharpening and noise reduction, etc., I’m not so sure it is worth the upgrade. For me, it is worth it since I don’t have many 3rd party plugins. And this is a major version change from Version 8 to Version 9.

[tim]

How well does the noise reduction work? I'm hoping to avoid having to buy a seperate package if the CS2 one's ok.

[photofinish]

I think the CS2 one will work well enough in most cases. Obviously, for those unique occasions products like Neatimage probably work better.

[BoySpot]

I installed it last night and haven't had much time to play around with it. One question, though. What happened to the auto-rotate of potrtrait images. They now seem to default to landscape in Bridge but are fine in RAW. Also, in the drop down for the calibration section, the manual suggests you can choose between ACR2.4 and ACR3 but I only seem to get 2.4 Any more knowledgeable users better understand this?

[cmM]

thanks for the review on the new software :)

Would you happen to have NeatImage (or anyone with CS2)? I'd love to see some comparissons as far as noise reduction

[CyberDyneSystems]

Two of the things that allwyas makes me hesitate when a new PS is realeased are the following.

1. I hate reinstalling plug ins!!!! Yes I know you can make the new install simply use a common folder for plug ins.. but this does not work with some plug ins that have more intensive copy protection. In those cases you HAVE to reinstall. Nothing else to say on it,. it's juts a pain.

2. Interface changes... I still miss some aspects of the PS7 interface that were changed in PSCS. Any guidance on what will drive us nuts about PSCS2?

[tommykjensen]

How is the speed of CS2?

Is it faster or slower than CS?

[drisley]

I find CS2 to be a tad more sluggish than CS.
I think they completely re-engineered the GUI too.
Just dragging the Photoshop window around XP it redraws slower.
CS2 combined with Bridge are memory hogs for sure. I have a very high end Athlon 64 system with PCI Express video and 1GB PC3200 ram, and this is the first time I've actually wished I had 2GB.
Overall operations are about the same speed as CS. However, the old "progress bar" that used to be on the photoshop status bar is now gone. For all operations that take less than 5 seconds, you get no progress bar. Any longer than 5 seconds, and a progress bar pops up in the middle of the screen. A lack of progress bar takes some getting used to.

[PacAce]

Two of the things that allwyas makes me hesitate when a new PS is realeased are the following.

1. I hate reinstalling plug ins!!!! Yes I know you can make the new install simply use a common folder for plug ins.. but this does not work with some plug ins that have more intensive copy protection. In those cases you HAVE to reinstall. Nothing else to say on it,. it's juts a pain.

2. Interface changes... I still miss some aspects of the PS7 interface that were changed in PSCS. Any guidance on what will drive us nuts about PSCS2?
For the most parts, there aren't a whole bunch of interface changes that people might find annoying. However, a lot of people routinely click on Image > Mode > Convert to Profile to switch from one color space to another. And they do it automatically without thinking about it. Well, guess what? This function no longer in the Image dropdown menu. It's been moved to Edit as it's own selection, as in Edit > Convert to Profile. No biggy but you have to think about it now until you get used to the new location.

They moved a few other menu items, too, like the Color Settings (at least this is true for the Mac).

I do like the new Bridge interface, though. Very nicely done. I'm hoping I can still use it when the trial period runs out on PSCS2 since it does seem like an independent program from PSCS2 proper. But, as a whole, I don't think I'm willing to shell out $150 to upgrade to it from PSCS. Other than Bridge, I haven't found any other new functions in PSCS2 that would compell me to upgrade to it.

[drisley]

Actually, Bridge doesn't make PS slow to a crawl like the old PS CS browser did.
That's a plus.

[photofinish]

One thing I'm a little worried about and will have to experiment later with, is archiving. From what I read in the CS2 manual, there is alot of picture caches that get created in the Bridge and are associated with the Raw processing. There is also some talk about how to store the settings properly in the DNG format. I'm not sure what to do about all of this yet.

But related to the questions above about performance, these caches, which you can tune and relocate to any drive, do improve display speed the NEXT time you look at your RAW directory, or other pictures directories. That was always a problem for me in the past...

[drisley]

Yes, you can set ACR/Bridge to store your Raw settings the old way, in one central archive, or the new way, in a file for each raw image in the same folder as your raw image. The latter makes archiving much easier.
Also, as far as picture cache, you can set a limit on that in the Bridge preferences. I think default is 1 GB.

[PacAce]

One thing I'm a little worried about and will have to experiment later with, is archiving. From what I read in the CS2 manual, there is alot of picture caches that get created in the Bridge and are associated with the Raw processing. There is also some talk about how to store the settings properly in the DNG format. I'm not sure what to do about all of this yet.

But related to the questions above about performance, these caches, which you can tune and relocate to any drive, do improve display speed the NEXT time you look at your RAW directory, or other pictures directories. That was always a problem for me in the past...
I don't think this is anything new. We have the same thing with PSCS.

[tim]

Don't worry about the cache, it's a performance thing, not a settings thing. What's important is the database that contains your settings for the RAW images, exposure and sure. I have another thread on how to transfer them from CS1 to CS2 that's still got no replies... i'll work it out myself eventually if no-one answers and post what I find.

[Todd Jacobsen]

Loaded CS2 on Friday.

Works great but I am disappointed in the Bridge. I was hoping it would incorporate the organizer functions contained within PSE3.0, the "mini-me" to PSCS. Since PSE3.0 came out AFTER PSCS, I was hoping the Bridge (PSCS2) would pick up these capabilities. I was sadly disappointed.

Fortunately, I already owned PSE3.0 (for the IPOD), I just don't want to keep having to maintain it separately from CS upgrades.

Because of my reliance on PSE Organizer (stacks/version sets), my use of the Bridge is very limited.

I do like the ACR changes in PSCS2 (ACR3.0) - MUCH BETTER TOOL!!

PSCS2 loads slower than PSCS.