Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Mac Review
I recently installed Adobe Photoshop CS2 on my 12" Apple powerbook with a G4 processor, and 768mb of ram running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). The application performed great, and runs very stable.
I have been using Photoshop 5 on Windows for a while, and I found the updated version, and the Mac version were not any harder to use. I did find the tool options bar a little bit hard to use at first. Other than that things basically work in the classic photoshop style.
My primary use for photoshop is creating web graphics, screen shots, and a little bit of photo manipulation. I am a web developer with close to 10 years experience building, and designing web sites. I've used Photoshop for nearly that long as well.
As far as new features there are quite a few handy features since version 5. It is now much easier to make rounded boxes which in todays web design are quite common. As a web developer I find this new feature to be the most usefull.
I found the Healing Tool to be the coolest new feature. With the healing tool you can click on something like a freckel on your arm and it will remove it. The healing tool does a really really good job at blending the result. Try it out it does have quite a wow factor.
The only dissapointing thing is that only the next version of photoshop will have universal binary support, although I have heard that it runs well in rosetta.
Pros
- Extreamly powerfull image manipulation tool
- Great Quality for image resizing, smoothing
- Lots of filters, and plugins available
- Tons of Tutorials available on the web.
Cons
- No Universal Binary Support for Mac - Yet
- Sometimes overkill for simple tasks
Notable New Features
- Adobe Bridge - Browse your image files, and perform batch manipulations
- Sample Preview of fonts in the font chooser drop down
- Vanishing Point - I saw a demo of this feature, you can use this to scale images on a 3D plane. Very handy if I even need to do something like this.
- Smart Objects - Sort of like Symbols in Flash
Overall photshop is a must have graphics editing program for web developers and designers. Photoshop's plethora of features can be very overwhelming for a beginner, but the power yeilded by the program makes learning how to use it very rewarding.
Retail Price: $649.00
