CS2 to be released

Khaos · April 4, 2005

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0504/05040402adobe_pscs2.asp

Nikolai · April 5, 2005

Yyyyyes!

Khaos wrote:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0504/05040402adobe_pscs2.asp

Just saw it myself, wanted to post here, but you beat me to it

Looks interesting...
Cheers!

patch29 · April 5, 2005

I posted it here and have some links to tutorials and more to show off some of the new features.

rutt · April 14, 2005

Dan Margulis panned it
He just posted his reveiw of CS2, and to oversimplify, he panned it. I know he is very sinsitive about having his words reproduced, so I'll just give a very high level summary. If you want to read his full comments, you'll have to join his yahoo mail group and look in the archive. The group is http://groups.yahoo.com/colortheory Search for "Comments on Creative Suite" and I think you'll find the review pretty quickly. You may even be able to follow this link without being a member of the group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/colortheory/message/10590

In short:

Dan hates activation. Everything else would have to be about 1000 times better for activation to be worth it for him.
He misses the file browsser which has now been replaced by something called the bridge which he doubts will ever be as good.
He regrets that assign to profile and convert to profile have been moved to different menu locations.
He likes the new ability to apply various 3d and perspective transforms to selections as well as to entire images. There is a related "vaniishing point" filter which also shows promise.
He loves a new filter called "Surface Blur" which works more like USM than Gaussean blur in that it has a threshold control allowing it to be targeted at noise without bluring transitions.
He is dissapointed by "Smart Sharpen". My reading is that he thinks something really great could be done with today's knowledge and instead it's a big yawn that he will probably never use.
He thinks Smart Objects are interesting but doubts that very many people actually have enough use for them to justify the learning curve.

My takeaway from his review was "skip this release".

rutt · April 14, 2005

OK, I just can't restrain myself. Here is Dan's final paragraph:

I will be shopping for a car later this year. If the dealer tells me that the reason I should buy his model is that it could have been made much, much worse, I will think back on Creative Suite 2 with fondness.

colourbox · April 15, 2005

rutt wrote:

He just posted his reveiw of CS2, and to oversimplify, he panned it.....My takeaway from his review was "skip this release".

Man, you need to see some other reviews. I think Margulis' is the only negative one I've seen. I respect Margulis and learned an awful lot from his books. But they guy is a true curmudgeon and probably would see that as a compliment. He always overreacts to these new releases.

Everything I've read about the Bridge says that it is a greatly enhanced version of the current file browser. It looks like it is just on this side of being a true standalone media manager. I haven't been able to get ot the article but I sure am curious why he is so dead set against it all. Unless it's just the usual Margulis being afraid of change. Which is not at all unusual of what I have read of his.

There is a lot more indepth coverage here:
Photoshopnews.com
Adobe's own forums (adobeforums.com).
CreativeMac "This is no wimpy little update designed to suck more money out of existing customers. This is, without a doubt, a full version upgrade and then some."

On the first two sites non-Adobe experts/testers like Andrew Rodney, Martin Evening, and Bruce Fraser are already handing out advice about what they've seen. Might change your opinion. Although all of our opinions will change, one way or another, once we see what actually ships and we can get out from under the hype.

rutt · April 15, 2005

colourbox wrote:

Man, you need to see some other reviews. I think Margulis' is the only negative one I've seen. I respect Margulis and learned an awful lot from his books. But they guy is a true curmudgeon and probably would see that as a compliment. He always overreacts to these new releases.

Of course, you're right about Dan. He is very conservative. At the heart of that is this: he has a very effective workflow developed over a career working with digital images. He judges a new release by whether or not it adds anything to this workflow. PS7 didn't and he panned it. PS/CS had shadow/highlight, ACR, and full support for 16 bit images, and he loved it. He didn't find a new tool to help him do the things he does in CS2.

What Dan does is different than what a lot of people do with PS. He eschews local changes if at all possible except use of the sharpening tool. Curves, colorspaces, plate blending, and USM are his stock in trade. He is very clear that he is not making artistic decisions, only trying to make the image look "correct".

It sounds like the new blur filter almost got him. I think if there had been a similar improvement for sharpening he might have gone for it. But he is just never going to like activation. More than 2/3s of his review is about how bad a thing it is. Pretty easy to see both sides of this one.

Dan says the bridge is slow. I already find the file browser too slow for culling the good shots and throwing out the bad ones from a bad shoot. I had to cobble together my own thing from scripts and used parts, so it doesn't matter that much to me.

I'll probably upgrade on my desktops and not on my portables. In the field, I just need something that works and activation might be an issue there. I have a few plugins that really need to work as well...

patch29 · April 26, 2005

Photoshopnews posted some more Adobe Raw Convertor 3.0 info and images here.