Adobe Photoshop CS Upgrade

Some ram­blings on why I have come to love this new edition.

Your first reac­tion to pur­chas­ing the CS upgrade may be a bit of dis­be­lief about your deci­sion as the user inter­face, at least on first blush, is almost iden­ti­cal to the PS 7 inter­face apart from the new splash screen and logo.

Don't be mis­led by the looks of it, CS sports sev­eral MAJOR improve­ments, and I've become increas­ingly more impressed as I've used it the past few weeks.

So far I'm espe­cially thrilled about the more com­pre­hen­sive (but not com­plete yet) 16-bit image sup­port, cam­era RAW sup­port plus auto-stiching of images, text on a path, cus­tomiz­able key­board short­cuts, a facelift for Open­Type fonts, more layer func­tions (comps, nested layer sets, and the abil­ity to export both as indi­vid­ual files), and above all the vastly improved and far more use­ful File Browser.

It's now pos­si­ble to cre­ate MM Flash ani­ma­tions with vec­tor art­work and vari­able text in ImageReady CS, bun­dled with Pho­to­shop CS just as before Enhanced ImageReady user inter­face and more image manip­u­la­tions fea­tures and improve­ments, espe­cially for web design.

If you're into video, there's now innate sup­port for pixel aspect ratio cor­rec­tion and sev­eral pre­sets for work­ing at var­i­ous video resolutions.

Ever wanted to match a par­tic­u­lar color in an image and replace it with another one? Well, it's pos­si­ble with a "Color Replace­ment Tool" which works a lot more accu­rately than selections.

The price is a bit steep for an "upgrade" but you won't regret it. Highly recommended!