Photography more your bag? Don't miss Photoshop CS2—Every New Feature for Photographers

What are the hot new tools and updated features in the latest version of the graphic design industry's workhorse, Photoshop CS2?

• Multiple Layer Control

• Image Warp

• WYSIWYG Font Menu

• Adobe Stock Photos

• Automated Variable Graphics Creation

• Customizable Menus

• And much more!

Get comfortable. There's a lot to tell you about.

Smart Objects Smart Objects let you scale and transform images without loss of quality. Integrate and preserve the quality and editability of Illustrator CS2 vector graphics and, similar to Illustrator’s Symbols, create linked duplicates of embedded graphics. With Smart Objects, editing a single copy automatically applies to all instances—no more cut n’ paste or cloning for every little change.

Vanishing Point Taking the lead from Mok3’s Perspective Clone Brush, Photoshop CS2’s new Vanishing Point lets you effortlessly clone, paint, and transform with tools that automatically adjust to the visual perspective of your images.

Image Warp 3D perspective manipulation of images and packaging mockup isn’t just for Illustrator any more. Fold, stretch, pull, twist and wrap any image into shape, as easily as selecting an on-demand preset or dragging custom control points.

Spot Healing Brush One-click retouching is possible with the new Spot Healing Brush, which paints flaws away, removes entire objects, and heals across all layers in various blending and sample modes—even in 16-bit, CMYK images.

Image Warp (photo from Adobe.com)

One-Click Red-Eye Correction A favorite feature of Photoshop Elements finally comes home to the professional with advanced controls for pupil size and darkening.

Optical Lens Correction Easily counteract barrel, pincushion and perspective distortion, and quickly correct chromatic aberration and vignetting, in any photo.

Smart Sharpen The first major enhancement to sharpening in Photoshop in several versions, Smart Sharpen selectively and intelligently counteracts common types of photo blurring, without affecting the areas of your image that don’t need adjustment. With fine control of shadow and highlight areas and discrete sharpening of lens, motion and gaussian blurs, Smart Sharpen is a cut above the standard unsharp mask.

Advanced Noise Reduction Reduce Noise gives you advanced enhancement of problem images, including special handling for JPEG artifact reduction, and even discrete correction of individual color channels, all while preserving edge details.

Graphics in Motion First it was in Photoshop, then ImageReady, now it’s back in Photoshop CS2:  animated Web graphics. A new Animation palette and animation enhancements to the Layers palette allows web content creators to spend more time in Photoshop and jump less frequently to ImageReady.

 

More Power in More Modes

CS (version 8) first brought 16-bit image support to Photoshop, but few filters and adjustments supported this high-end, data-rich format. With CS2 (version 9), the Photoshop Team sharpened their attention and Photoshop’s on doing more with more, allowing more corrections to your high-color 16-bit images before having to convert down into 8-bit. More filters—including, believe it or not, Liquify—now work on 16-bit images.

Even Shadow/Highlight, one of our favorite adjustment additions to Photoshop CS, now supports images in CMYK mode as well as RGB.

Photoshop CS2 adds support for the latest in digital imagery, 32-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR). Gaining in popularity (for obvious reasons) in the fields of 3D rendering, advanced compositing, and professional photography. HDR adapts to the full spectrum and range of visible light in the same way as the human eye.

 

Productive Customization & Automation

Variables Missing from the raster image workflow since the demise of ImageStyler in 1998, automatic creation of images returns in Photoshop CS2! Populate your designs with data imported from spreadsheets and databases, or defined directly in Photoshop CS2, to have automatically generated, data-driven images!

Event-Based Scripting Actions have been an incredible time-saver since Photoshop 4, and they haven’t changed much in that time. Until now. Now Actions can be truly automatic, waiting for a certain event—saving or printing, for example—and then automatically springing into action to perform the steps you specify.

Vanishing Point (photo from Adobe.com)

Multiple Layer Control Breaking bad habits, Photoshop CS2 moves away from the link layers and modify workflow that has become a crutch. New layers interactivity speeds productivity when working with layers by taking the focus off the layers. Drag and Shift-select multiple layers on the canvas, without even touching the Layers palette—or just Shift click on layers in the Layers palette to instantly link them.

Smart Guides Automatically appearing while aligning graphics, Smart Guides finally make precise visual alignment possible without the need to link layers and use alignment buttons.

WYSIWYG Font Menu Arguably one of the most often requested features on any application’s wish list is WYSIWYG font menus or some other way to view fonts in their typefaces. Now Photoshop CS2 shows you samples of each typeface right inside the font menu, and icons to instantly differentiate between PostScript, TrueType and OpenType fonts.

Menu Customization Keyboard shortcut customization was one of the features that made Photoshop CS truly great. Now CS2 takes that one jump further with customized menus. Pre