Downloaded the trial on the weekend. I'm a first timer with Photoshop (been using LR2) so it should be a big learning curve. Really need help with figuring out actions for eye sharpening and skin softening for kids portraits. I think that will make life a ton easier and quicker.
Downloaded the trial on the weekend. I'm a first timer with Photoshop (been using LR2) so it should be a big learning curve. Really need help with figuring out actions for eye sharpening and skin softening for kids portraits. I think that will make life a ton easier and quicker.
If you're keen on portraits, I strongly recommend Portrait Professional. PS is too much of a hassle if all you do is portraits.
Wow, this is scary-powerful stuff. Mighty impressive technology that is, unfortunately, making it harder and harder to distinguish photographic fact from fiction.
It's spawned a bit of playful backlash amongst some in the photography community. Care to order a "Content Aware Photographer" t-shirt?
Wow, this is scary-powerful stuff. Mighty impressive technology that is, unfortunately, making it harder and harder to distinguish photographic fact from fiction.
It's spawned a bit of playful backlash amongst some in the photography community. Care to order a "Content Aware Photographer" t-shirt?
I think that it isn't as big a deal as some are making it. While a time saver, it will never actually be able remove large obstructions or generate complex parts of images. It is really only good on stuff like distant telephone poles and stuff like that. My point is that even if people use this tool, the photograph will be more fact than fiction. Oh, and this tool seems to use the fact to create new content, i.e. it does some kind of cloning. When I use content aware on larger objects, a clone of another part of the image usually shows up.
I think that it isn't as big a deal as some are making it. While a time saver, it will never actually be able remove large obstructions or generate complex parts of images.
Note the removal of the huge tree in the upper left of the first photo, the removal of the road from the desert scene, and the extension of the panorama at the end. Especially on the panorama, it is literally creating content out of thin air. Look to the right of the pano, instead of just extending the tangent of the horizon, CAF decides that there should be a hill there.
This is actual AI technology, I studied it for a semester in grad school.
-Jack
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
Note the removal of the huge tree in the upper left of the first photo, the removal of the road from the desert scene, and the extension of the panorama at the end. Especially on the panorama, it is literally creating content out of thin air. Look to the right of the pano, instead of just extending the tangent of the horizon, CAF decides that there should be a hill there.
This is actual AI technology, I studied it for a semester in grad school.
Wow! What is does in that video is amazing. I'm sure those images were selected because they worked really great, but as long as that is representative of what it can do on our own images, it does do some amazing things.
Especially on the panorama, it is literally creating content out of thin air.
Well, not really out of thin air. It must have enough "content" to be "aware" of. It's not hard to find a situation where it runs out of "ideas." The smaller the surrounding area the more trouble there is. I tried to patch up an area too close to an unlike area, and it didn't work well. It's great when there are large swaths of desirable fill-in material, but if the available content is not suitable, it does have its limitations...
Yes really! Look again at the panorama in that video. On the right side, it creates a hill and a saddle where there was nothing. It "should" have just continued the line of the horizon straight across, but instead it decided to get creative!
I agree it must have limitations, of course. I don't have it yet but I'm sure it couldn't remove a woman's hair to reveal her eye, or stuff like that.
-Jack
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
Just took advantage of my last semester of eligibility and ordered CS5 Extended (Student Version) and LR2. I was hoping that LR3 would be released in time for me to get it with the student discount, but alas, the release kept getting pushed back. When I downloaded the LR3 Beta version last fall, the rumor was a release in March or April, but with no word of a real date and the semester coming to a close, I had to pull the trigger or risk losing the great price. So now we'll get to play with CS5 and LR2 and upgrade to LR3 if we decide it's worth it.
Hopefully will ship today (educational status already verified - that was fast!), and should have it by the end of the week. ;-)
ok, stupid question - what is the difference between CS and LR? why would you need both?
Good question. I'll tell you when I find out.
Seriously, I haven't used PS at all, and I've only used the Beta version of LR3. But from what I understand, LR does a lot of photo management stuff like tagging, importing/database management, global fixes to all your files (lens corrections, exposure/WB adjustments, etc) and can do some level of processing. Then PS is for more heavy-duty processing, including HDR and pano-stitching (both of those functions are supposedly improved on CS5 vs. CS4, not that I have any experience with CS4). Anyway, I bought both because I figure that both will have a place in my workflow, and Adobe gives ridiculous discounts for students. This is my last semester as a student, so I wanted to get both while I was still eligible.
ok, stupid question - what is the difference between CS and LR? why would you need both?
If you take lots of photos LR is a must. If I HAD to choose, I would take LR because if I could not manage my photos, I would be lost. I have 10K photos and take about 200/mo. Keywords and collections keep me organized. All of my minor development (exposure, contrast, H&S) and some selective lightness adjustments are in LR. Printer config is best in LR
But anything that requires masks and layers go to PS. And lots of things require that.
...from what I understand, LR does a lot of photo management stuff like tagging, importing/database management, global fixes to all your files (lens corrections, exposure/WB adjustments, etc) and can do some level of processing.
If you take lots of photos LR is a must. If I HAD to choose, I would take LR because if I could not manage my photos, I would be lost.
Photoshop comes with Bridge, which can do almost all of that too. You can do keywords and collections in Bridge. If it was a pure feature list comparison, Lightroom would only have marginal value in addition to Bridge. The difference is, Lightroom is more integrated for these tasks and also has much better keyboard shortcuts, just enough that it's worth paying for in the time savings. Photoshop plus Bridge is just inconvenient enough the Lightroom becomes worth having. It sounds funky but that's how it is.
Then PS is for more heavy-duty processing, including HDR and pano-stitching.
This is true although you can get some plug-ins to to HDR with Lightroom.
Photoshop is more for when you need to get at the pixels, which you can't do in Lightroom, like cutting out pieces or assembling multiple images together.
Well, sort of, but it can only deal with a single folder at a time and since it has no database, it has to reload all the metadata each time you switch folders. It's perfectly fine for a day-to-day workflow--it's what I use--but it is entirely inadequate for maintaining even a modest sized archive. LR's database lets you search your entire archive by keyword and other metadata.
Well, sort of, but it can only deal with a single folder at a time and since it has no database...LR's database lets you search your entire archive by keyword and other metadata.
The Find command in Bridge can search subfolders optionally, so pick the highest folder you need (the archive for instance) and search everything under it. Also, once keywords etc. are entered, they are IPTC standard so you can use your OS search to find them from your desktop. Inside Bridge you can also set the Find to search with your OS search engine, like Spotlight on the Mac, instead of the Bridge engine. I suppose this option is in case your OS has a faster search cache or something.
Also if you turn on the subfolder option in Bridge you can use the Filter panel to search by metadata.
Having said all this, Lightroom still does the same thing faster and without being as clumsy as Bridge.
Well, sort of, but it can only deal with a single folder at a time and since it has no database, it has to reload all the metadata each time you switch folders. It's perfectly fine for a day-to-day workflow--it's what I use--but it is entirely inadequate for maintaining even a modest sized archive. LR's database lets you search your entire archive by keyword and other metadata.
Richard, I was under an impression that LR searching capabilities are limited to a single (current, selected, working, etc.) "catalog" only.
Have something changed, or was I wrong right off the bat?
I was under an impression that LR searching capabilities are limited to a single (current, selected, working, etc.) "catalog" only.
Have something changed, or was I wrong right off the bat?
That's correct, but I don't understand why most users would have any need for multiple catalogues. Images can be identified as "current, selected, working, etc" or in any other ways without introducing the disadvantages of multiple catalogues.
I'm presently managing over 55,000 extensively-keyworded images in more than 700 folders with a single LR catalogue, without any performance issues or other problems. And when I do a keyword search, it looks across all my images, almost instantly. Sure, multiple catalogues are supported if you really need them, but why?
Richard, I was under an impression that LR searching capabilities are limited to a single (current, selected, working, etc.) "catalog" only.
Have something changed, or was I wrong right off the bat?
Hey Nik,
I don't use it myself, so I may not have the LR vocabulary right. But I think a "catalog" is a database in LRspeak, but the actual pics are not constrained regarding their location. You do have to move them around from within LR so that it can keep track of them, but they can span many folders, volumes, etc. I believe there are still some issues about accessing the catalog across networks, which is why some people have multiple catalogs, but otherwise, I'm not sure why anybody would want more than one. I'm sure real LR users will correct whatever misconceptions I have.
Richard, I was under an impression that LR searching capabilities are limited to a single (current, selected, working, etc.) "catalog" only.
Have something changed, or was I wrong right off the bat?
I have all my images in one catalog (nearly 150,000 images), that spans hundreds of directories and several disks. I put a given project (like a soccer season) in a directory hierarchy on disk and then in LR, I can either search all images or just images within a given disk hierarchy. Lightroom 3 (in late stage beta now) has made performance improvements for very large catalogs since the preferred LR workflow is to use one large catalog for most purposes and that's how most people like to work.
When one imports images into LR, you can choose to move the images into the LR database or leave the images where they are and just refer to them in their current disk location. I like to use the disk hierarchy as part of my organizational structure so I leave them on disk. It also means that even if LR went totally haywire (something I've never experienced), my images are all still where I can find them (albeit without changes I've made in LR).
As was said elsewhere in the thread, you can move images on disk at any time as long as you move them from within LR so it can keep track of where they are.
I used to use Bridge as my organizer tool and I can definitely tell you that LR saves me tons of time compared to Bridge. Once you work out how to best accomplish your workflow in LR, it's much more capable than Bridge.
I have all my images in one catalog (nearly 150,000 images), that spans hundreds of directories and several disks. I put a given project (like a soccer season) in a directory hierarchy on disk and then in LR, I can either search all images or just images within a given disk hierarchy. Lightroom 3 (in late stage beta now) has made performance improvements for very large catalogs since the preferred LR workflow is to use one large catalog for most purposes and that's how most people like to work.
When one imports images into LR, you can choose to move the images into the LR database or leave the images where they are and just refer to them in their current disk location. I like to use the disk hierarchy as part of my organizational structure so I leave them on disk. It also means that even if LR went totally haywire (something I've never experienced), my images are all still where I can find them (albeit without changes I've made in LR).
As was said elsewhere in the thread, you can move images on disk at any time as long as you move them from within LR so it can keep track of where they are.
I used to use Bridge as my organizer tool and I can definitely tell you that LR saves me tons of time compared to Bridge. Once you work out how to best accomplish your workflow in LR, it's much more capable than Bridge.
Thank you John!
Originally I experienced LR becoming quite sluggish if adding tons of images to one catalog. What you're saying about LR3 is interesting. Maybe I'll give it a try...
I used to use Bridge as my organizer tool and I can definitely tell you that LR saves me tons of time compared to Bridge. Once you work out how to best accomplish your workflow in LR, it's much more capable than Bridge.
I just started using lightroom as my organizer/importer and I certainly agree that it extremely capable, and I think I've saved hours by using it.
CS5 mini-review
I've been using the trial version of CS5 for a couple of weeks now so I thought I might share some observations. I haven't tried to find and use every new thing, but only have used it in my normal workflow. Still, it might be useful to some. I had been using CS3 up until now, so some of the stuff that was new to me is probably old hat to CS4 users.
Download and installation were painless enough, though it irked me a bit that once I completed the installation, it told me that I had to install another 90 MB of updates and there was yet another update the following day. Having been through the upgrade process before, I expected to lose my preferences and was not disappointed. Mysteriously, a few presets were imported by the installer--curves, for example--but others--custom crop sizes--were not. And, of course, actions were ignored altogether, so I had to do the usual hack to copy them into the appropriate directory. Most of them worked as before, but a few keyboard shortcuts that I had been using were no longer recognized and one now has a mysterious pause in the middle of it. One would think that Adobe could figure out by now how to import all the customizations that loyal users have done over the years, but one would be wrong. Grumble, grumble. The installer mucked with my external device settings, so that my external drive and card reader started prompting me about what to do when I connected them. Not a big deal to reset the default, but an unnecessary annoyance. Adobe still has a lot to learn about installers.
Bridge looks a little different but so far I haven't found anything new that's especially useful. The installation did import my keywords, workspaces and a few ACR presets automatically. There are a few new EXIF field filters that might come in handy at some point. PS now has a mini-Bridge included. I'm used to working with Bridge on one program tab and PS on another. I haven't done any testing to see if the mini-bridge saves memory compared to what I was doing, but it would be nice if it did. I did see a few glitches when culling a set of pics rapidly--it seemed to have trouble keeping up and stopped responding to ctl-number for assigning ratings and once it popped up a warning that meta-data writes pending and data would be lost if I didn't go for a coffee break. It also got into a strange state when it maxed out memory, but I was able to kill it and restart it without data loss. The Photoshop Services script is no longer available, which for me means that I can't upload to SmugMug directly from Bridge.
ACR 6.1 is a big improvement over 4.6. I haven't sampled all of the enhancements yet, but the thing I was most interested in--noise reduction--seems to work very well indeed. I've only had to resort to Noiseware a few times in the past two weeks. I think I will probably be using it automatically through ISO 1600, but after that, I'm not so sure. Still, that's a big step forward. Sadly, scroll wheels are still not recognized by the ACR sliders, which is a real drag for people who like to work with a mouse.
My real concern was whether CS5 was going to be too much for my 2 and 1/2 year old 3 GB machine to handle. ACR previews now have a noticeable lag when I adjust the controls, whereas with 4.6, there was no latency. Not surprising since the processing pipeline is longer. PS installed with OpenGL hardware support disabled, but since my graphics card meets Adobe's minimum requirements I enabled it. Big mistake. Apart from significant tiling when repainting the previews, there is a bug which causes PS to go south when the machine returns from sleep. It also can cause Windows (XP) to freeze entirely and require a forced power-down restart. Not good. My impression is that with the exception of smooth preview resizing, no significant functionality is lost if you are sticking with the PS standard edition and not using 3D or other extended edition goodies. If you're running an older machine, I would encourage you to take advantage of the 30 day trial before buying the upgrade. I don't doubt that it runs much better on newer, beefier hardware.
Finally, PS itself. Content-aware cloning, healing and fill are not magic, but they are going to save me a lot of time, I think. If you think you are going to be able to heal your ex out of a pic with a click of the mouse, you will be disappointed. But for more routine tasks, it's great. For example: sometimes I have to straighten a shot in which the subject is close to the edge. The rotation leaves blank space, which I prefer to fill rather than crop. That used to be a laborious cloning process, but in many cases I was able to select the blank space with the magic wand, hit content-aware fill and it was done. Doesn't work all the time, mind you, but I have seen it do some fairly sophisticated things. In any event, even when it fails it gets you part way there. In general, the less complex the surroundings are, the better it works, which is what one would expect.
HDR is also significantly improved. I don't use it all that much and have never used Photomatix, so I can't compare the two, but besides enhanced controls, it now offers automatic ghost removal. I only tried it a few times and it worked very well. That's going to be a big timesaver for me and may encourage me to try using HDR more often in street shooting, where something's always moving. Additionally, you can apply all of the controls to a single image if you want to imitate that over-the-top HDR look. I don't, really, but I know many people love it. Calculation and conversion are still very resource intensive and it takes a long time on my machine, but not noticeably longer than it used to.
The UI is a little different from CS3. It's a little more flexible, but mainly it puts old wine into a new bottle. There are a couple of new features that absolutely rock: the rule of thirds grid overlay when cropping is a big help in composition. The mask panel is also a timesaver and being able to control mask opacity independent of layer opacity is just great. There's a vibrance adjustment layer, which is nice but doesn't work in LAB mode. I thought I had heard something about shadow/highlight as an adjustment layer, but if it's there I haven't found it.
I'm not a graphic artist, so I haven't even looked at the new brushes or puppet warp. Maybe they'll come in handy someday, dunno. It looks like a few old bugs have been fixed--the vanishing point filter seems to be more stable than it was in CS3 and a peculiar problem I used to have with the polygonal lasso tool is gone. Some of the old filters still only work in eight bit mode. Guess they always will.
Bottom line: my machine is marginal for this software, but unless something terrible happens in the next week, I'm going to pop for the upgrade. I think it's worth it.
Thank you John!
Originally I experienced LR becoming quite sluggish if adding tons of images to one catalog. What you're saying about LR3 is interesting. Maybe I'll give it a try...
That has been my experience too, Nick, once my catalogue houses 25,000+ images everything about LR2 slows way down way too much to be acceptable. With my PowerMac w dual 2.8Ghz + 14Gb of RAM, in 64 bit mode.
I am hoping LR3 will be bettervin this regard.
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BTW...they shipped Fedex overnight for free! Offer to end soon. So no down side to getting a physical copy.:D
Pre ordered Creative suite Apr 23rd still waiting for email confirmation of shipment. From what I understand backorder is long.
Brady
this is some high octane Artificial Intelligence!!
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
If you're keen on portraits, I strongly recommend Portrait Professional. PS is too much of a hassle if all you do is portraits.
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smug site
It's spawned a bit of playful backlash amongst some in the photography community. Care to order a "Content Aware Photographer" t-shirt?
http://www.facebook.com/cdgImagery (concert photography)
http://www.cdgimagery.com (concert photography)
http://chrisdg.smugmug.com (everything else)
I think that it isn't as big a deal as some are making it. While a time saver, it will never actually be able remove large obstructions or generate complex parts of images. It is really only good on stuff like distant telephone poles and stuff like that. My point is that even if people use this tool, the photograph will be more fact than fiction. Oh, and this tool seems to use the fact to create new content, i.e. it does some kind of cloning. When I use content aware on larger objects, a clone of another part of the image usually shows up.
Umm, check the video I posted above (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI)
Note the removal of the huge tree in the upper left of the first photo, the removal of the road from the desert scene, and the extension of the panorama at the end. Especially on the panorama, it is literally creating content out of thin air. Look to the right of the pano, instead of just extending the tangent of the horizon, CAF decides that there should be a hill there.
This is actual AI technology, I studied it for a semester in grad school.
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
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Well, not really out of thin air. It must have enough "content" to be "aware" of. It's not hard to find a situation where it runs out of "ideas." The smaller the surrounding area the more trouble there is. I tried to patch up an area too close to an unlike area, and it didn't work well. It's great when there are large swaths of desirable fill-in material, but if the available content is not suitable, it does have its limitations...
Yes really! Look again at the panorama in that video. On the right side, it creates a hill and a saddle where there was nothing. It "should" have just continued the line of the horizon straight across, but instead it decided to get creative!
I agree it must have limitations, of course. I don't have it yet but I'm sure it couldn't remove a woman's hair to reveal her eye, or stuff like that.
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
Hopefully will ship today (educational status already verified - that was fast!), and should have it by the end of the week. ;-)
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An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
Good question. I'll tell you when I find out.
Seriously, I haven't used PS at all, and I've only used the Beta version of LR3. But from what I understand, LR does a lot of photo management stuff like tagging, importing/database management, global fixes to all your files (lens corrections, exposure/WB adjustments, etc) and can do some level of processing. Then PS is for more heavy-duty processing, including HDR and pano-stitching (both of those functions are supposedly improved on CS5 vs. CS4, not that I have any experience with CS4). Anyway, I bought both because I figure that both will have a place in my workflow, and Adobe gives ridiculous discounts for students. This is my last semester as a student, so I wanted to get both while I was still eligible.
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But anything that requires masks and layers go to PS. And lots of things require that.
Photoshop comes with Bridge, which can do almost all of that too. You can do keywords and collections in Bridge. If it was a pure feature list comparison, Lightroom would only have marginal value in addition to Bridge. The difference is, Lightroom is more integrated for these tasks and also has much better keyboard shortcuts, just enough that it's worth paying for in the time savings. Photoshop plus Bridge is just inconvenient enough the Lightroom becomes worth having. It sounds funky but that's how it is.
This is true although you can get some plug-ins to to HDR with Lightroom.
Photoshop is more for when you need to get at the pixels, which you can't do in Lightroom, like cutting out pieces or assembling multiple images together.
The Find command in Bridge can search subfolders optionally, so pick the highest folder you need (the archive for instance) and search everything under it. Also, once keywords etc. are entered, they are IPTC standard so you can use your OS search to find them from your desktop. Inside Bridge you can also set the Find to search with your OS search engine, like Spotlight on the Mac, instead of the Bridge engine. I suppose this option is in case your OS has a faster search cache or something.
Also if you turn on the subfolder option in Bridge you can use the Filter panel to search by metadata.
Having said all this, Lightroom still does the same thing faster and without being as clumsy as Bridge.
Richard, I was under an impression that LR searching capabilities are limited to a single (current, selected, working, etc.) "catalog" only.
Have something changed, or was I wrong right off the bat?
I'm presently managing over 55,000 extensively-keyworded images in more than 700 folders with a single LR catalogue, without any performance issues or other problems. And when I do a keyword search, it looks across all my images, almost instantly. Sure, multiple catalogues are supported if you really need them, but why?
I don't use it myself, so I may not have the LR vocabulary right. But I think a "catalog" is a database in LRspeak, but the actual pics are not constrained regarding their location. You do have to move them around from within LR so that it can keep track of them, but they can span many folders, volumes, etc. I believe there are still some issues about accessing the catalog across networks, which is why some people have multiple catalogs, but otherwise, I'm not sure why anybody would want more than one.
When one imports images into LR, you can choose to move the images into the LR database or leave the images where they are and just refer to them in their current disk location. I like to use the disk hierarchy as part of my organizational structure so I leave them on disk. It also means that even if LR went totally haywire (something I've never experienced), my images are all still where I can find them (albeit without changes I've made in LR).
As was said elsewhere in the thread, you can move images on disk at any time as long as you move them from within LR so it can keep track of where they are.
I used to use Bridge as my organizer tool and I can definitely tell you that LR saves me tons of time compared to Bridge. Once you work out how to best accomplish your workflow in LR, it's much more capable than Bridge.
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Thank you John!
Originally I experienced LR becoming quite sluggish if adding tons of images to one catalog. What you're saying about LR3 is interesting. Maybe I'll give it a try...
I've been using the trial version of CS5 for a couple of weeks now so I thought I might share some observations. I haven't tried to find and use every new thing, but only have used it in my normal workflow. Still, it might be useful to some. I had been using CS3 up until now, so some of the stuff that was new to me is probably old hat to CS4 users.
Download and installation were painless enough, though it irked me a bit that once I completed the installation, it told me that I had to install another 90 MB of updates and there was yet another update the following day. Having been through the upgrade process before, I expected to lose my preferences and was not disappointed. Mysteriously, a few presets were imported by the installer--curves, for example--but others--custom crop sizes--were not. And, of course, actions were ignored altogether, so I had to do the usual hack to copy them into the appropriate directory. Most of them worked as before, but a few keyboard shortcuts that I had been using were no longer recognized and one now has a mysterious pause in the middle of it. One would think that Adobe could figure out by now how to import all the customizations that loyal users have done over the years, but one would be wrong. Grumble, grumble. The installer mucked with my external device settings, so that my external drive and card reader started prompting me about what to do when I connected them. Not a big deal to reset the default, but an unnecessary annoyance. Adobe still has a lot to learn about installers.
Bridge looks a little different but so far I haven't found anything new that's especially useful. The installation did import my keywords, workspaces and a few ACR presets automatically. There are a few new EXIF field filters that might come in handy at some point. PS now has a mini-Bridge included. I'm used to working with Bridge on one program tab and PS on another. I haven't done any testing to see if the mini-bridge saves memory compared to what I was doing, but it would be nice if it did. I did see a few glitches when culling a set of pics rapidly--it seemed to have trouble keeping up and stopped responding to ctl-number for assigning ratings and once it popped up a warning that meta-data writes pending and data would be lost if I didn't go for a coffee break. It also got into a strange state when it maxed out memory, but I was able to kill it and restart it without data loss. The Photoshop Services script is no longer available, which for me means that I can't upload to SmugMug directly from Bridge.
ACR 6.1 is a big improvement over 4.6. I haven't sampled all of the enhancements yet, but the thing I was most interested in--noise reduction--seems to work very well indeed. I've only had to resort to Noiseware a few times in the past two weeks. I think I will probably be using it automatically through ISO 1600, but after that, I'm not so sure. Still, that's a big step forward. Sadly, scroll wheels are still not recognized by the ACR sliders, which is a real drag for people who like to work with a mouse.
My real concern was whether CS5 was going to be too much for my 2 and 1/2 year old 3 GB machine to handle. ACR previews now have a noticeable lag when I adjust the controls, whereas with 4.6, there was no latency. Not surprising since the processing pipeline is longer. PS installed with OpenGL hardware support disabled, but since my graphics card meets Adobe's minimum requirements I enabled it. Big mistake. Apart from significant tiling when repainting the previews, there is a bug which causes PS to go south when the machine returns from sleep. It also can cause Windows (XP) to freeze entirely and require a forced power-down restart. Not good. My impression is that with the exception of smooth preview resizing, no significant functionality is lost if you are sticking with the PS standard edition and not using 3D or other extended edition goodies. If you're running an older machine, I would encourage you to take advantage of the 30 day trial before buying the upgrade. I don't doubt that it runs much better on newer, beefier hardware.
Finally, PS itself. Content-aware cloning, healing and fill are not magic, but they are going to save me a lot of time, I think. If you think you are going to be able to heal your ex out of a pic with a click of the mouse, you will be disappointed. But for more routine tasks, it's great. For example: sometimes I have to straighten a shot in which the subject is close to the edge. The rotation leaves blank space, which I prefer to fill rather than crop. That used to be a laborious cloning process, but in many cases I was able to select the blank space with the magic wand, hit content-aware fill and it was done. Doesn't work all the time, mind you, but I have seen it do some fairly sophisticated things. In any event, even when it fails it gets you part way there. In general, the less complex the surroundings are, the better it works, which is what one would expect.
HDR is also significantly improved. I don't use it all that much and have never used Photomatix, so I can't compare the two, but besides enhanced controls, it now offers automatic ghost removal. I only tried it a few times and it worked very well. That's going to be a big timesaver for me and may encourage me to try using HDR more often in street shooting, where something's always moving. Additionally, you can apply all of the controls to a single image if you want to imitate that over-the-top HDR look. I don't, really, but I know many people love it. Calculation and conversion are still very resource intensive and it takes a long time on my machine, but not noticeably longer than it used to.
The UI is a little different from CS3. It's a little more flexible, but mainly it puts old wine into a new bottle. There are a couple of new features that absolutely rock: the rule of thirds grid overlay when cropping is a big help in composition. The mask panel is also a timesaver and being able to control mask opacity independent of layer opacity is just great. There's a vibrance adjustment layer, which is nice but doesn't work in LAB mode. I thought I had heard something about shadow/highlight as an adjustment layer, but if it's there I haven't found it.
I'm not a graphic artist, so I haven't even looked at the new brushes or puppet warp. Maybe they'll come in handy someday, dunno. It looks like a few old bugs have been fixed--the vanishing point filter seems to be more stable than it was in CS3 and a peculiar problem I used to have with the polygonal lasso tool is gone. Some of the old filters still only work in eight bit mode. Guess they always will.
Bottom line: my machine is marginal for this software, but unless something terrible happens in the next week, I'm going to pop for the upgrade. I think it's worth it.
Thank you for the awesome run-through.
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That has been my experience too, Nick, once my catalogue houses 25,000+ images everything about LR2 slows way down way too much to be acceptable. With my PowerMac w dual 2.8Ghz + 14Gb of RAM, in 64 bit mode.
I am hoping LR3 will be bettervin this regard.
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