Adobe CS 2.0 now official - on their web site

[Andrew Booth]

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/main.html

"Image editing with Adobe Photoshop CS2

Revolutionary Vanishing Point

Achieve amazing results in a fraction of the time with the groundbreaking Vanishing Point, which lets you clone, brush, and paste elements that automatically match the perspective of any image area.

Multiple layer control

Select and move, group, transform, and warp objects more intuitively by clicking and dragging directly on the canvas. Easily align objects with Smart Guides.

Smart Objects

Perform nondestructive scaling, rotating, and warping of raster and vector graphics with Smart Objects. Even preserve the editability of high-resolution vector data from Adobe Illustrator software.

Multi-image digital camera raw file processing

Accelerate your raw file workflow with simultaneous processing of multiple images while you continue working. Import images into your choice of formats, including Digital Negative (DNG); enjoy automatic adjustments to exposure, shadows, and brightness and contrast; and much more.

Image Warp

Easily create packaging mock-ups or other dimensional effects by wrapping an image around any shape or stretching, curling, and bending an image using Image Warp."

 

[Phil King]

--
Phil

 

[Anfy]

At 499 (Euros) for standard edition, ugrade from PS, it can be attractive.

Or do I need the premium edition (with Acrobat pro e Golive)?

• Anfy

"Sorry for my english, not for my opinions"

 

[Andrew Booth]

Sorry...

 

[grey-ghost]

Adobe order page for the CS2 Professional says ship May, 2005. No more details than that.
--
Mike

 

[Steve Bingham]

For starters:

1- 36 bit HDR sounds really exciting. A way to double dynamic range if necessary. This will save a LOT of PS work.

2- Bumping up to using 3.5 mb of ram (verses current 2)
3- Smart sharpen - again saving me a lot of work.
4- Noise reduction - sure other software is available, but this is built in.
5- Optical lens correction - for gentle tweaking of occasional distortion.

Will I upgrade? Just as soon as I can!

--
Steve Bingham
http://www.dustylens.com

 

[unbound]

1- 36 bit HDR sounds really exciting. A way to double dynamic range if necessary. This will save a LOT of PS work.

Sounds like a false statement to me. How does that work? If the camera has captured a limited dynamic range, how does increasing the bit count change anything? I doubt we weill even see any help with posterization when compared to 16 bit. And file sizes would be REALLY ridiculous at 16 bit.

 

[Steve Bingham]

You use two images of the same scene - like with auto bracketing. Expose one scene -2, the other +2 and than combine them into one 32 bit image. You now have an honest 32 bit, 11 stop range. Of course you can not print that range, but you can play with it to get exactly what you need that will print. The thing is, this has now been made automatic and expanded to 32 bit. PS CS 2 is a powerful tool designed for serious post production. PS Elements 3.0 is all 99% of photographers need.
--
Steve Bingham
http://www.dustylens.com

 

[Steve Bingham]

. . . and my file sizes are not unmanageable at 72 megs. I guess it depends on how serious you need to get. 8 bit will work for 99% of photographers. Some professionals really DO need 16 bit. Time marches on . . . and serious pros march with it.
--
Steve Bingham
http://www.dustylens.com

 

[photogeek]

DR will remain the same, on your monitor and printer. What you will get is a lot more gradations between 0 and (so to speak) "255", which does indeed preserve detail, especially when doing extreme adjustments multiple times.

If I know anything about Adobe, HDR images will not be fully supported in CS2. Some crucial tools, like converting them to Lab or sharpening with Unsharp Mask filter, or layers, will not support HDR. So CS2 will support maybe 10% of its functions in HDR, CS3 will go to 30% and CS4 to 50%. You will have to pay $150 for each upgrade, though.

I'd rather see them do the following in CS2:

1. Proper color management in Camera RAW - getting great color out of it should not require "calibration" and futzing with each frame, at least not for popular cameras.

2. Better demosaicking algorithm. ACR output is a lot softer than C1 output, especially in areas of fine color detail.

That's about all I want from them. Unfortunately (for them), it seems they will not get my "upgrade" money with CS2.

 

[jeremybirn]

The reason they call HDR images HDR (High Dynamic Range) is that they support values above 1 (or above "255" as Photoshop calls it) and below 0. It's a full floating point value.

I don't know if HDRI support will be that useful to photographers, but for people like me who work in computer graphics and need to use other software like HDR Shop or Shake to deal with HDR images, this support will be very valuable. If you've worked with HDR Shop and tried putting together bracketed images, you know there are a lot of issues. Just going +2 and -2 is not all there is to it - especially if your adjustment changes the f-stop so the DOF doesn't match, or you have to correct for your camera's colorspace.

I agree support will be limited in terms of the number of functions that work with HDR images - even in their own press release they talk about having just upgraded some functions like Liquify to work with 16-bit, so obviously there will be a big lag before you can do everything with HDRI.

-jeremy

 

[photogeek]

Wanna bet that levels and curves will still be 0 to 255? That's the way they are for 16 bit images. I know what HDR means. What I was trying to say is that the first cut of it will be very limited.

One of the most exciting advantages of HDR that I've seen in some Longhorn demos at developers conference is that successive edits introduce very little error. You can darken the image to nearly zero, and in the next step bring it back to its original level with little to no loss of detail.

 

[jeremybirn]

I hear you.

I hope they have some levels controls, or else they can't honestly say they really have HDRI support. I hope the "info" box displays FP values as well.

It's kindof funny when I look at new product announcements this week to compare what Adobe does:



to other new products (see the bottom of the screen):



-jeremy

 

[Mathias Tornqvist]

I may be wrong, but I'm still not sure if you understand DR. What you're describing is the difference between 8-bit and normal 16-bit. Instead DR is about extending past the 255, and below the 0, very much like a B&W film negative.

In a normal contrast 5-stop print of a high contrast situation, say, a dim interior with bright sunlight visible outdoors through a window, for the interior to be exposed acceptably the exterior will be entirely blown out - everything will be at level 255 (This happens to me all the time when shooting archietctural interiors). Or vice versa - if the exterior is exposed well, everything indoors will be black - level 0. With a DR file, a highlight outdoors could be, say, 350, and the blackpoint indoors might be -125. Unmanipulated the DR image will still print anything beyond the 5-stop range as 255 and 0 (and therefore look the same), but now you have the option of selectively bring down the exposure outdoors, or bringing it up indoors. In a DR file, by bringing (with a layer mask) the outdoors down by, say, 100, now you can get a good exposure of the outdoors, to 250.

If you, on a regular file, 8 or 16-bit alike, were to bring down the exterior by 100, all you'd get is an even 155 - a patch of middle gray.

If a camera has an 11-stop dynamic range (we wish), you couldn't actually print all 11 stops unmanipulated. It would look very low-contrast and flat. You'd need to bring up contrast to look right, and therefore put several stops of image information above white point and below the black point (rendering those areas pure black or white). In a DR file you can do this without loosing that data.

This can potentially be huge, assuming that when cameras improve, they take advantage of this format. Photoshop might not enable everything under DR, but all we need to make good use of it are adjustment layers and support for it in a Photoshop file.

Photogeek, you probably knew all of this, but others are quite confused about it, I think.

DR will remain the same, on your monitor and printer. What you will
get is a lot more gradations between 0 and (so to speak) "255",
which does indeed preserve detail, especially when doing extreme
adjustments multiple times.

 

[photogeek]

DR of your output devices is already much narrower than DR of your DSLR sensor. So no matter how many bits you stuff between min and max you aren't going to increase it.

And nothing really goes below zero. Otherwise, how are you going to map it to 8 bits for printer/display output?

 

[Mathias Tornqvist]

It's true that just about any media has narrower dynamic range than our capture methods. It's in the post processing of an image where we can bring selective areas of an image fup rom below zero, or down from above 255. It used to be done all the time with film, though dodging and burning - how else do you think Ansel Adams got those great textured skies?

Our eyes have an amazing capability of registering a huge range of light at the same time (15-stops??? - I'm just guessing). The trick is to emulate that onto a 5-stop pice of paper.

DR of your output devices is already much narrower than DR of your
DSLR sensor. So no matter how many bits you stuff between min and
max you aren't going to increase it.

And nothing really goes below zero. Otherwise, how are you going to
map it to 8 bits for printer/display output?

 

[photoaddict]

Only 3.5 GB of RAM? Is Adobe kidding us? I understand it requires a 64-bit OS such as Mac OSX or Win64 which makes perfect sense but I expected Adobe to have a much BIGGER RAM support... like 16 GB of RAM support than just a measly 3.5 GB of RAM for 64-bit OS's.

-jeff

 

[unbound]

The dynamic range for an individual photo coming out of the camera is still the same, regardless of how many bits you use to process it. You are right that you can take two separate exposures, and combine them, but that is VERY different from getting a larger dynamic range, and has NOTHING to do with processing bit depth. If the camera captured a zero (minimum) or a 255 (maximum), it can not give you more than that, regardless of how many bits you use to process it.

If you were taking a single low dynamic range image and stretching it to get the maximum theoretical dynamic range, then the higher bit count would help to avoid posterization issues, and nothing else. Noise would still be horrendous in the shadows.

The whole purpose of having more bits is to facilitate stretching of single images with limited dynamic range, and has absolutely nothing to do with combining images. By combining images, you can get away with 8 bits just fine, since you are avoiding 'stretching' the exposure.

 

[Wayne Larmon]

....I understand it requires a
64-bit OS such as Mac OSX or Win64....

Where did you read that?

Wayne Larmon

 

[Steve Bingham]

Let me quote Photofocus.com and his explanation of the Beta. This is the way I understand it to work. It simply saves you tons of time if this is your thing - and it is mine!

"With digital, we started exposing for different parts of the scene and then manually dragging each image into Photoshop, stacking them and creating a series of complicated masks to hide or reveal parts of the image that didn't fit in our final product.

Now, it's as easy as opening CS 2.0 and selecting FILE > AUTOMATE > MERGE TO HDR. You select two or more images to merge and Photoshop automatically finds the parts of each exposure and merges them together.

This new tool allows you to achieve the ultimate in dynamic range with automatic conversion of exposures to 32-Bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. That's right, I said 32-bit! When Adobe gave me a private demonstration of this feature in Beta, I don't think they realized how important it was. This will be a real time saver.

Using HDR you can effectively get 12-14 stops of latitude into your digital images and maintain incredible quality. You can now take control of the full detail from the deepest shadows to the brightest highlights, and everywhere in between. You can use Merge to HDR to even create 32-bit HDR images from your current digital camera, by automatically combining a series of regular exposures."

Get it?

Steve Bingham
http://www.dustylens.com