Photoshop - the bread and butter software for any graphic artist, has gone through a new version upgrade.

Photoshop CS2 - a wierd name… hmm… also for a software that is so perfect in all aspects - what is left to improve ?

HD of course more and more resoultion! It seems it can handle 32-bit images now (HDR - High Dynamic Range). It also has a new tool (gimmick ?) ‘Vanishing Point’ which lets you paint to prespective. Will it die like the useless ‘Paint History’ , ‘Art History’ and Audio Annotation, which was forced into CS to make the users ‘want’ and upgrade ? Not sure, and too early to say without playing with it.

Vanishing Point

HDR Support

It looks like the above picture effectively compresses the dynamic range of a series of photos into a single photo. Current digital cameras cant shoot a picture like the one above. Why ? Because the CCDs cannot resolve such a wide dynamic range. Well, what is a dynamic range ? It is the distance between blackest black and whitest white - the farther the better. So, a 2 stop dynamic range will look black and white with no greys. A 12 stop dynamic range will look like the picture above, where you can see bright sky and also the dark shadows.

Looks like CS2 takes a bunch of pictures and extracts such a picture automatically (?) Previously, we used to do it with a trick called ‘digital-stitching’. Tho I’d not like to admit, a few of my photos in http://www.andshoot.com are digitally stiched to preserve the dynamic range.

Will I upgrade ?

I have to…right ? and so will thousands of fellow graphic designers. Nobody wants to be a freak…nobody wants to be left out… its after all Adobe - will they ever let us down ?