Is Photoshop CS2 Worth It?

[James Fee]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_73/essay.html' target='_blank'>http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_73/essay.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Photoshop CS2 will be the tenth upgrade of Photoshop that I have purchased over the past ten or so years. Earlier releases were uniformly greeted with great enthusiasm (in Photoshop 3.0 - Adobe gave us Layers; in Photoshop 4.0 - they gave us Adjustment Layers; and in Photoshop 5.0 - they provided Color Management). But recent releases have often be meet by a significant amount of scorn and complaints about the lack of really interesting new features; a quick scan of various digital photography websites, Blogs and forums reveals a modest stream of complaints about the limited new features in the latest release of Photoshop. Well, I’d like to make the argument that Photoshop CS2 is overwhelmingly worth the upgrade price, and introduce you to a few of the features that I think make my photographic life easier."</i><br /><br /> <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/300_Image0.jpg" /> <br /><br />As time goes on, I find the new features in Photoshop less and less important to me. I think I'll be staying on Photoshop CS 1 and PS Elements 3 for now. But you should read up on and see if any of the new features are of interest to you (I do have to admit, Merge to HDR sounds interesting).

[Kursplat]

Kinda off-topic. Did you upgrade from Elements 2 to 3? If so, do you still feel the upgrade was worth it?

In reviewing the new features on the box, I wasn't sure if it was worth the price to upgrade.

[djh]

For sure I'm going to upgrade CS1.

However, not with CS2. I've been trying out the Bibble plug-in as an alternative to Adobe Camera Raw and it's amazingly better. This is where my upgrade money will go.

I did try CS2 for a couple of days, but for me there was nothing helpful. It's already deleted.

[James Fee]

Kinda off-topic. Did you upgrade from Elements 2 to 3? If so, do you still feel the upgrade was worth it?Well RAW support was important, but I still use PSE 2 because it runs much quicker, at least for me Elements 3 is a dog.

There is some improvement to tools, but nothing that really jumps out. Just RAW support.

[Neil Enns]

There's no way I'm shelling out for this. How many of us, honestly, find ourselves in a position where we shoot images that have such a wide dynamic range that HDR would really be useful? All the rest of the features they offer seem to be evolutionary changes to features that appear to still be better served by the other two tools in my arsenal: CaptureOne and PhotoKit Sharpener.

Neil

[Phoenix]

Good grief, didn't the first version of this arrive on the shelves "two minutes" ago? And already they have version 2.

:roll: