Not a photographer? Don't miss Photoshop CS2-Every New Feature for Graphics Pros

Next to a camera, Photoshop is the most important tool of any professional photographer's trade. So what can the photo pro or prosumer look forward to in the ninth release of Adobe's favorite son, Photoshop CS2?

Plenty.

• Noise Reduction

• Optical Lens Correction

• Smart Sharpen

• Spot Healing Brush

• Red Eye Tool

• Task-Based Presets & Customizable Menus

• Digital Asset Management with Adobe Bridge

• HDR Support

• Multi-Image Camera Raw Processing

• Export to Television Monitors

• And more!

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

Photo Pro Necessities

Do you bracket your shots—dumb question. Who doesn't bracket most of the time? With the Merge to HDR feature Photoshop CS2 can automatically combined bracketed digital exposures into a single 32-bit HDR image, creating breathtaking images that are otherwise impossible to capture with traditional cameras.

Multi-Image Camera Raw Process an entire photo shoot while simultaneously working on other images in Photoshop CS2. Convert files in batch to different formats, including the new Digital Negative specification (DNG), crop and straighten losslessly, and automate adjustments to exposure, brightness and contrast, and precise curve and color settings. It's simply the best and most versatile Camera Raw yet.

Camera RAW Image Editing (photo from Adobe.com)

Video Preview Easily preview any image or animation on a television monitor through by direct export from Photoshop CS2 via FireWire (i.LINK/IEEE 1394).

Camera Manufacturer Raw Support Adobe Camera Raw is compatible with most raw-capable digital cameras, including models from:

• Canon
• Contax
• Fuji.lm
• Kodak
• Konica Minolta
• Leaf
• Leica
• Nikon
• Olympus
• Panasonic
• Pentax
• Sigma
• Sony

Check the always up to date list on Adobe.com

 

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.

Vanishing Point (photo from Adobe.com)

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.

 

High-End Touch-Up

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.

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.

Spot Healing Brush (image from Adobe.com)

Advanced Noise Reduction High ISO digital camera shots can be breeding grounds for ugly color noise. 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.

 

Productive Customization & Automation

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.

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-equipped with several task-specific menu presets, Photoshop CS2 literally changes the environment to suit the task and you.

Color-Coded Menu Commands Always getting lost in that long Adjustments menu when you just want to quickly get to Channel Mixer? Change the color of Channel Mixer just like you would a layer or layer group (no longer called sets). In addition to customizing the menus, you can color code any menu item or sub-menu!

Workspaces In all the CS applications (except Illustrator, which now has it as well) was the ability to save the visibility, locations, and arrangement of palettes in a workspace. A great feature—especially for those who share workstations or perform different types of tasks in Photoshop—it didn't go far enough. In CS2, Photoshop really does allow changing and saving of the entire workspace. Of course palette arrangements are still savable and restorable, but now so are menu sets and color-keyed menu commands.

 

More Powerful Core Functions

Printing Enhancements New options in the Photoshop CS2 print dialog make it even easier to configure your local printer for great results and consistent color on all your printing jobs.

 

HDR Imaging Support (image from Adobe.com)

Instant Printing The new Print One Copy menu item instantly prints the active document, without the extra step of a Print dialog.

All-New PDF Engine Comprehensive, customizable PDF presets let you take advantage of the new PDF engine in Photoshop CS2, including PDF 1.6/Acrobat 7.0 compatibility.

Enhanced Memory Use Photoshop CS2 features memory management enhancement that breaks through the 2 GB RAM barrier. Now, devote up to approximately 3.5 Gigabytes of RAM to every Photoshop CS2 session.

Adobe Help Center The new Adobe Help Center floats above Photoshop CS2 in its own window, making it easier to use its improved search features and task-based help topics.

 

Asset Management

Adobe Bridge Taking Photoshop's File Browser to a new level, Adobe Bridge is a full-fledged digital asset management (DAM) solution that not only handles standard image formats—including the new Digital Negative specification (DNG)—and Photoshop documents but all Creative Suite 2 application native files. View thumbnails of Illustrator CS 2 .AI files and PDFs prior to opening them in Photoshop CS 2, or preview the InDesign CS 2 document for which you're creating images. Powerful document labeling, sorting, and searching makes Adobe Bridge a good DAM system. Of course, it still has batch processing features, which are even stronger than they were in File Browser.

Adobe Photoshop Services Share images, print online, order prints, and send to large-format output with the new integrated Adobe Photoshop Services.

 

Whew!

Photoshop CS2 is a major update to this standard of graphic design. It's packed with power and flexibility to make any job faster and easier, and open more creative possibilities. It's so robust we can't even decide on our favorite features there's so many! We've been waiting for this Photoshop for fifteen years!

Pariah S. Burke is the editor-in-chief of Quark VS InDesign.com, The Authority for News and Opinion on the War Between Desktop Publishing Giants QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. As a 20 year graphic communications industry veteran, he is also an in-demand desktop publishing and graphic design workflow consultant and software trainer, teaching ad and design agencies, print and pre-press production houses, and government and military agencies in InDesign, Quark, Adobe Creative Suite, InCopy, Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, Acrobat, Variable Data Publishing, and PDF Section 508 Accessibility.