Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Mac) [OLD VERSION]
by Adobe
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Software Reviews of Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Mac) [OLD VERSION]
Customer Review: A gem that can be enhanced and polished
Summary: 4 Stars
Photoshop is one of the great software products ever created. It has continued to evolve to match the needs of advanced digital photography, offering some really astonishing capabilities -- assuming that you have the time and necessary instructional materials. It has a steep learning curve.
Where Photoshop falls short is in ease of use. Along with features development, Adobe should focus on making the application simpler where possible. Even advanced users can benefit from simplicity. For instance, it could be much easier to crop photos to the conventional 3-to-2 proportion for printing and commercial processing. Adobe could adopt the kiosk method of visual cropping using a moveable box without eliminating the existing approach. It is especially bothersome to work a non-standard image into the 3-2 format, and many commercial processors automatically (and crudely) crop irregularly sized photos instead of fitting them entirely withing he selected print size. Adobe needs to acknowledge the reality of every day use, and offer a simplified solution. The company is a bit slow in this department, as evidenced by how long it took to create a relatively automated way to correct red eye.
There is always a group of users who defend software difficulty of use as they either profit from the time consumption (hourly billing), or it makes makes them feel important to gain mastery over something difficult. Adobe should ignore this minority and make Photoshop easier.
One nit that I pick with recent versions is that they have made the blur tool more clumsy. A high-pixel file need be viewed at 100 percent, or it is virtually impossible to see the effect of blurring. That wasn't necessary in the past, and it shouldn't be now.
Photoshop is a gem that Adobe can continue to polish and enhance.
Update Oct 06: Due to persistent screen redraw problems using Photoshop. Thus I have run into Adobe's unbelievably awful file-by-file "uninstall" process for CS2. It is the worst I've encountered for any OSX application and I would bring this down to three stars if it were possible. Adobe should be ashamed.
Customer Review: A horrible update from CS.
Summary: 1 Stars
Adobe Photoshop CS2 is a horrible update from the previous CS. As a photographer, I updated when I bought the new Canon Rebel XT because Adobe refuses to release a plugin for the XT's RAW format for CS. This is obviously an attempt to strongarm users into buying more software when it is not necessary.
CS2 has several new "innovations," which are slow, buggy, and a hindrance. The most notable of these is Adobe Bridge. An "update" from File Browser, it is an entirely separate application that's supposed to inhance management of your photo archives. In practice it is slow, uncomfortable, and not practical in any way. It does display RAW file information, but this is the only immediate plus I could find.
In compatibility with RAW files, CS2 refuses to save them after initial processing into a convenient format such as JPEG or BMP. Instead, it opts to save as a PSD, TIF, or Photoshop RAW. None of these are convenient, and I found myself constantly opening the images in Preview and converting them to a more accessible format.
CS2's most significant drawback was astounding: combined with Adobe Bridge (which is required to be open to browse photos within PS), CS2 uses a whopping 1.5 gigs of swap space on my system partition, and only for simple photo modifications. This is an absurd mismanagement of memory allocation, and a problem I never found I had with CS.
Overall, CS2 is a terrible upgrade from CS. Adobe is turning the way of Microsoft in releasing slow, buggy, and unreliable software consistantly, instead of taking the time to make a better product. Their refusal to release an XT CR2 plugin is even more proof of this. I decided it is more convenient to use the Canon Digital Photo Professional program that came with the XT to modify RAW files, and then open those saved as a high-res BMP into CS1, then to use CS2 at all. My advice is to not upgrade unless utterly necessary. Don't support Adobe's pathetic upgrade habits unless they choose to release quality products.