Product Description

Adobe Photoshop CS2 software, the professional image-editingstandard and leader of the Photoshop digital imaging line, deliversmore of what you crave. Groundbreaking creative tools help youachieve extraordinary results. Unprecedented adaptability lets youcustom-fit Photoshop to the way you work. And with more efficientediting, processing, and file handling, there's no slowing youdown. 13102125

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4735 in Software
• Brand: Adobe Systems Inc.
• Released on: 2005-04-28
• Platforms: PowerMac, Mac OS X
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 2.12 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Adobe Photoshop CS2 software, the professional image-editing standard and leader of the Photoshop digital imaging line, delivers more of what you crave. Groundbreaking creative tools help you achieve extraordinary results. Unprecedented adaptability lets you custom-fit Photoshop to the way you work. And with more efficient editing, processing, and file handling, there's no slowing you down.

Customer Reviews

The gold standard, improved
Photoshop has been the top of tree for image editing ever since it was first released. Adobe CS2 ups the ante in every respect. In the current version Photoshop offers full 16-bit editing, HDRI support for 32-bit images, outstanding support for Raw images from professional equipment such as Canon and Nikon, panorama stitching, lens distortion correction, a vastly improved form of sharpening, better image resizing, and the ability to apply certain photographic (as opposed to digital) filter simulations. Any of these improvements would be worth the price of the upgrade -- especially since many of them were previously available as individual third-party plugins for pretty much the same price _each_.

This new version does pretty much everything that has been on photographers' wish lists for some time. Most of the real benefits, though, are 'under the hood': almost everything works faster, quality is markedly improved on anything which involves resizing, and the 32 bit support opens the door into the next generation of photography.

The package also includes Image Ready, Adobe's stab at capturing the web-ready market back from Macromedia Fireworks. There really isn't a great deal to be said for Image Ready. Almost all the functionality is available directly in Photoshop, and Image Ready doesn't really compare with Fireworks in the specialised web-images environment.

A word of caution. If you're upgrading, you need to check very carefully which particular upgrade you are getting. There are separate upgrades from Photoshop CS, from versions of Photoshop from 5-7, and from version 4 and below. Ordering the wrong one is a nightmare.

Overall, CS2 is an extremely valuable and value-for-money new version of the classic. It's also possible to buy it as Adobe Creative Studio, which includes Illustrator and InDesign, or as Adobe Creative Studio Professional, which also includes Acrobat and Adobe's web-editing software GoLive. If you are upgrading Illustrator and Photoshop, it's actually cheaper to get the upgrade from Photoshop to Creative Studio rather than buying the upgrades individually. This would also give you a spare Illustrator license, and, of course, you get InDesign for free. The Creative Studio Professional is more difficult to justify -- Mac OS X now includes substantial Acrobat creation features, and Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop can all create their own PDF files directly. The current (6.5) version of QuarkXpress can create powerful Acrobat files, which was our previous (only) reason for owning Acrobat Distiller. Acrobat _may_ be worth the money if you specialise in PDF based forms. GoLive, in my opinion, really isn't -- it's a reasonably good piece of software, but since the entire web world is busy standardising itself around Dreamweaver and Flash, the very hefty price hike between CS Studio and CS Studio Professional would probably be better spent on acquiring Macromedia Studio.

Always an unmissable update
If there was any question Photoshop had left its competitors in the dust CS and CS2 leave no doubt. Yet again this update includes new features and reworking of old tools which predicatbly, make it very hard to go back to using earlier versions.
The file browser has had a mjor overhaul, long overdue, and now becomes adobe bridge, and indeed it is a much better interface for browsing image libraries, even incorporating an inbuilt feature for searching images on online stock image libraries, or even searching for a photographer for a specific project. its now very easy to see meta data alongside the images, but interestingly all meta data fields except keywords can be edited in adobe bridge, which would be a very data to edit there.
Again trying to move users away from some of the excellent noise reduction software available, Photoshop cs2 has upgraded its noise woeful reduction filter, but the results are still nowhere closes to the noise reduction available in some 3rd party applications.
The blur tools have also had a major reworking and indeed has become a much more capable, and vast suite of different blur filters.
The spot healing brush needs serious tweaking to get acceptable results, and its far easier to get excellent results with the healing brush, but this has now become a very well rounded and essential photoshop tool.
Again a well rounded update with a plethora of new tools, filters and capabilities which will be welcomed by the professional photographer or designer.

All you'll ever need, even now
I've used CS2 on iMac's for two years now, and wouldn't part with it. It was practically drilled into me how to use and treat it at graphics college, but I'm thankful I was taught this way - I gained two A's and two B's from 4 projects! One thing is most striking even now is that despite CS2 not being engineered for the Intel CPU (it was still for PowerPC for some reason...?) it operates beautifully slick; so much so you'd think it is a brand release. And that goes for the features too - I'm avoiding paying hundreds more for the upgrades were to be quite frank, this is perfect enough.

It's hard to find but you can still get a copy relatively cheap off ebay, if you're lucky!