Adobe Photoshop CS2 - media |
The good: Supports Camera Raw 3.0, DNG, and 32-bit HDR--all vital to pro photographers.
The bad: Advanced features require top-end hardware.
The bottom line: If you're a professional or ambitious amateur digital artist, we highly recommend Adobe Photoshop CS2.
Note: This product is part of the Adobe Photoshop CS2 series. See all products in the Adobe Photoshop CS2 series.
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As Photoshop's feature set has grown, so has the complexity of its interface. Fortunately, you can customize the interface to create your own personalized work space. Last year, with Photoshop CS, Adobe introduced the concept of multiuser interfaces, allowing one or more users to save and return to custom colors, tool, and palette layouts. Photoshop CS2 provides task-based, preset work spaces for Web design, painting, and image analysis. In addition, Photoshop CS2 also enables customization of both its menus and keyboard shortcuts. Even with all this customization, however, we recommend a large monitor--at least 19 inches--to view Photoshop CS2's entire interface and still have room to work on an image.
The ability to manipulate multiple layers with ease is a welcome improvement in Photoshop CS2. New Smart Guides, allowing you to align items across different layers, should also save you from always clicking within the Layers palette. Smart Objects, yet another new feature, lets you nondestructively edit Illustrator artwork. And, finally, there's a long-desired WYSIWYG font menu in this release.
Other new features offer a high gee-whiz factor but limited real-world use. For example, Vanishing Point provides automatic perspective correction within layers, making it easy to add new objects in context to old photos, but this feature requires powerful hardware to run smoothly. The Image Warp feature, already familiar to Illustrator aficionados, may be useful for distorting text on signs, but not everyone will need this feature.
Replacing last year's file manager are two apps. Adobe Version Cue 2.0, available with the full Creative Suite package, keeps track of alternative versions of images, even those produced by non-Adobe apps. The other file-management app, Adobe Bridge, is a visual file browser that displays thumbnail images, makes a file's metadata accessible for editing, and provides the interface to the online Adobe Stock Photo service.
Adobe ImageReady CS2 remains bundled as a separate application within Photoshop CS2, although there's more integration of the two products in this release. For example, Photoshop CS2 includes an animation feature similar to that already available in ImageReady; however, neither app is up to par with a dedicated animation application.
The Help Center provides a More Resources button, which takes you to the familiar options of online training, tips, and tutorials and forums. Phone support for Photoshop CS2 installation and product-defect issues is free, aside from toll charges. For more knotty issues, Expert Support calls are $39 per incident, and unlimited calls require a $159-per-year subscription.