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| Adobe Photoshop CS2 Free Download |
Adobe Photoshop CS2 Version 9
is part of Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 and brings a new range of
interesting features for digital photographers. The objective of this
review is to highlight the new and changed features compared to
Photoshop CS. As usual, we will focus on those features which are useful
to digital photographers.
This review of Photoshop CS2 is based on
the final version for Windows with Adobe Bridge 1.0.2 (the current
version is 1.0.1, but 1.0.2 should be available in the very near
future).
Following the Adobe Photoshop tradition,
each new version is a smooth evolution from earlier versions which makes
it easy to switch versions and allows you to benefit from your earlier
learning curve. Apart from a few exceptions, most of the commands and
shortcuts are identical to earlier versions.
I see no reason why besides the current
“classic” Photoshop view, there is no optional “modern” view based on
the progress made with Photoshop Elements 3 which has a toolbox and
expandable palettes which are integrated into the window itself. As far
as the palettes are concerned, it matters less as we still have the
palette well. But we are still stuck with the floating toolbox which
cannot be docked anywhere. Its odd shape takes up valuable real estate
and often gets accidentally hidden behind other palettes. I hope this is
the last version of Photoshop we have to put up with this rather
trivial inconvenience.
A long awaited improvement is the display
of a sample word next to the font name in the font list of the Type
tool so you have an idea what the fonts looks like. Unfortunately the
word “Sample” is not much to go by as it exemplifies only 6 sample
characters and no numbers.
Adobe Bridge
The File Browser which was introduced in
Photoshop 7 and improved in Photoshop CS is now called “Adobe Bridge”
because it can be accessed via the other Creative Suite applications as
well. Just like the File Browser, Bridge’s integration with Adobe Camera
Raw 3.1 allows you to preview, adjust, and process multiple raw files
at once. Moreover, the processing can be done in the background while
performing other tasks in Photoshop. Bridge can also run independently
from Photoshop as a standalone application. New features include
scaleable thumbnails, many types of image review modes, and improved
rating and labeling features. We will now have a closer look at the
performance.
Performance tests were done with on a
3.4GHz Pentium 4 machine, with 3GB RAM, 30″ Mac LCD driven by a Nvidia
Quadro FX3400 graphics card, four 200GB serial ATA disks (one for with
the OS and CS2, one dedicated scratch disk, two for data), with Windows
XP SP1, and no other applications running or installed. Test results
with other hardware configurations will of course be different. So you
should mainly be looking at the relative numbers.
Starting up Photoshop CS2 and then Adobe
Bridge 1.0.2 for the first time after a reboot took about 16 seconds.
Subsequently, it took about 8 seconds. Very similar to Photoshop CS and
the File Browser. However, you can launch Bridge faster as a standalone
application without opening Photoshop. The first startup after reboot is
at 6 seconds, slower than the 2 seconds ACDSee needs. For subsequent
launches, the difference is only about one second.
