It’s time for that review I promised you
Awhile back, I said some things that I’m not proud of. In my haste and eagerness to get Adobe CS3 installed on my MacBook Pro, I skipped the section in the web-page that informed me how to get a serial number to activate it. While the necessity for such things still rankles, there was no excuse for my stupidity. A kind reader helped me through my dilemma and pointed out my oversight. I promised a proper review of CS3 and now, a month later, I think I’m ready to deliver on that promise.
First entry into the new software, for me, is through Bridge. I’ve been moving away from lesser cataloguing software like iPhoto and using Bridge for managing my collection. It’s worth noting the excellent book on the subject, “Photoshop CS2 for Digital Photographers Only” (Ken Milburn) which has helped me make the move to RAW photography and Bridge.
So, what’s new in Bridge? First thing you might notice is the darker background. It’s not quite Lightroom dark, but it is a dark grey not-unlike Apple’s pro applications. I’ve always liked dark grey backgrounds for applications. They’re easy on the eyes and allows you to focus on the subject at hand. In this case, the pictures. In any case, if that’s not your cup of tea, you can change the background lightness in the preferences. I think I darkened mine a bit more with a slightly brighter photo preview area.
There are a number of available Workspaces in Bridge now with different focusses for the user. The default view splits the screen into three or four panes. A favorites/folders panel in the upper right is used for navigating the filesystem, while a newly-added filter pane underneath that allows you to narrow your focus. The middle section of the screen presents thumbnails of the photos in the selected folder, while the panel at right presents a preview of the selected image with a metadata section under that. If that’s too cluttered and you just want to look at the photos in a directory, go to the “Light-table” workspace. There are also two filmstrip workspaces, a file-navigator space and a metadata focus space. In a preview window, clicking on the image brings up a trendy “loupe” zoom tool for closer inspection of a photo.
As neat as they are, I have yet to actually spend any time in any of the other views, sticking mostly to the default workspace. The filmstrips would be useful for previewing a directory, but I’m content with the default view.
Double-clicking a photo brings up the Camera Raw application for managing color and white-balance before loading into Photoshop. This is a full-featured app in its own right, allowing you to tweak color temperature and saturation if your camera’s settings weren’t tuned properly at shooting time. There are also a number of new features worth-noting. A digital vibrance slider above the saturation control lets you bring up brighter, richer colors. You can adjust tonal characteristics, reduce noise and apply lens corrections right in Camera Raw now, allowing you to do a lot of fine-tuning of your shot before importing into Photoshop. Settings can be saved for applying as a batch to a set of files once you’ve got settings for a particular lighting set. As with the previous version, you can save directly from Camera Raw bypassing Photoshop altogether if you don’t need it.
Onto Photoshop CS3. The Big Kahuna application. The reason all this stuff is here in the first place. The most-significant change and the one that will mean the most to Mac users, is that Photoshop CS3 is now a Universal Binary, running natively without emulation on newer Intel Macs. This is a huge deal in itself and no doubt the result of some pretty serious effort on Adobe’s part. As the first of the Big Three applications to make the leap to Universal, it whets our appetite for the remaining two (Illustrator CS3 is due out Any Day Now, or so I’m led to believe).
Performance in Photoshop CS3 is obviously much better than CS2 on Intel Macs. Heavy operations on PowerPC Macs are somewhat improved in CS3 vs. the same operation in CS2 according to MacWorld (and this article from BareFeats as well as a comparison of Windows and Mac performance). Batch operations appear somewhat slower, but as this is Beta software, there will no doubt be optimization improvements ship-time nears.
Ok, so what else does it have? A reworking of the plugin engine now allows more plugins to operate in higher color-spaces. Before, most plugins were limited to 8-bit RGB. Now most of the blur, sharpening, nose-reduction and shape-tweaking plugins will operate on 16-bit RGB and even CMYK. This is a huge improvement for photographers working in pre-print and in RAW photos.
Visually, the app has changed very little. The palette windows have darker tabs on them now, more consistent with the look of Bridge. The tools “dock” can be expanded out from the side to reveal more options. Overall, the look of the application’s been improved without really changing much of it. It’s a nice improvement.
All is not perfect. You’re occasionally reminded that you’re still working with Beta software. Saving from Camera Raw almost always crashes for me. Sometimes the Loupe tool in Bridge gets confused showing distorted images. Photoshop’s Merge HDR function doesn’t seem to work for me, though that’s probably because I haven’t figured out how to use it yet. That said, CS3 is a great piece of software, deserving of its long-standing position as the 800lb gorilla of the photo space.
Finally, no review of Photoshop would be complete without a picture. I present to you, the Toronto Crew and a shy Phil.
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