Adobe Photoshop CS

Rating:
Summary: Bloatware at its best
Review: Adobe continues its tradition with an industry-leading product in Photoshop CS. Photoshop has long been the industry standard in graphics and photo editing. With the introduction of Photoshop CS, the product has gotten even better. What's more, Adobe listens and is uniquely in tune with the needs and requests of Photoshop users. They have listened and added the most requested enhancements to this product.

Many new enhancements are added. For example, the color replacement tool. This wonderful tool allows you to choose a color on a photograph that you would like replaced, pick the color you would like to replace it with (even between images and layers!), then easily highlight and replace the offending color. This saves so much time and effort when editing and correcting photographs.

Photoshop CS has also picked up new things from it's cousin Illustrator. You can now to text on a line with ease. This has been a standard feature of Illustrator for a long time. However, it did not come in Photoshop. Now, rather than hassling with drawing the curve and using warp or some other technique to "wrap" the text onto the line, Photoshop CS can do it in one easy step.

As a Web Designer, I cannot say enough about all of the features available in this program. ImageReady has been enhanced to include improvements in the user interface. You can now create and modify web designs faster with multiple object selection, object grouping, and smart guides. There are also great improvements in image slicing, which is very important. You can now slice complex, layered images and apply appropriate format and compression settings to each area before exporting as an HTML table.

Another enhancement for Web Designers is that Photoshop CS can export as a Macromedia FlashÓ (SWF) file. Now you can use ImageReady CS to create FlashÓ animations that include the vector artwork and variable text. This enhancement really helps when compressing images and vector art for inclusion on a webpage or into a FlashÓ presentation.

Since I also occasionally work with video in Adobe Premiere, I can also really appreciate the enhancements that they have included in Photoshop CS for 16-bit and video production. The square to non-square pixel issue has always been a problem when taking images to video. Adobe has once again listened to the users and improved the non-square pixel support. Now we can create and work with non-square pixels with different aspect and not have to worry about distortion.

In summary, this is another homerun for Adobe with a product that far exceeds its competitors-bar none. The new enhancements, plus the ability to extend Photoshop CS exponentially with third-party plug-ins makes this program a must-have for any serious photographer, graphics designer or web designer.

Way to go Adobe!

Rating:
Summary: Another Homerun for Adobe!
Review: Adobe continues its tradition with an industry-leading product in Photoshop CS. Photoshop has long been the industry standard in graphics and photo editing. With the introduction of Photoshop CS, the product has gotten even better. What's more, Adobe listens and is uniquely in tune with the needs and requests of Photoshop users. They have listened and added the most requested enhancements to this product.

Many new enhancements are added. For example, the color replacement tool. This wonderful tool allows you to choose a color on a photograph that you would like replaced, pick the color you would like to replace it with (even between images and layers!), then easily highlight and replace the offending color. This saves so much time and effort when editing and correcting photographs.

Photoshop CS has also picked up new things from it's cousin Illustrator. You can now to text on a line with ease. This has been a standard feature of Illustrator for a long time. However, it did not come in Photoshop. Now, rather than hassling with drawing the curve and using warp or some other technique to "wrap" the text onto the line, Photoshop CS can do it in one easy step.

As a Web Designer, I cannot say enough about all of the features available in this program. ImageReady has been enhanced to include improvements in the user interface. You can now create and modify web designs faster with multiple object selection, object grouping, and smart guides. There are also great improvements in image slicing, which is very important. You can now slice complex, layered images and apply appropriate format and compression settings to each area before exporting as an HTML table.

Another enhancement for Web Designers is that Photoshop CS can export as a Macromedia FlashÓ (SWF) file. Now you can use ImageReady CS to create FlashÓ animations that include the vector artwork and variable text. This enhancement really helps when compressing images and vector art for inclusion on a webpage or into a FlashÓ presentation.

Since I also occasionally work with video in Adobe Premiere, I can also really appreciate the enhancements that they have included in Photoshop CS for 16-bit and video production. The square to non-square pixel issue has always been a problem when taking images to video. Adobe has once again listened to the users and improved the non-square pixel support. Now we can create and work with non-square pixels with different aspect and not have to worry about distortion.

In summary, this is another homerun for Adobe with a product that far exceeds its competitors-bar none. The new enhancements, plus the ability to extend Photoshop CS exponentially with third-party plug-ins makes this program a must-have for any serious photographer, graphics designer or web designer.

Way to go Adobe!

Rating:
Summary: Bloatware at its best
Review: Adobe is a big company and has tons of money, so why are they charging us an arm and a leg for bloatware that runs very slow? Launching the program takes half a minute on my 6-month-old PC with 512 mb RAM. A lot of things are hard to understand, which means you'll need to shell out more cash for a learning book, and Adobe wants you to buy their expensive books! Get jasc or other better products from independent software publishers. There's even a decent open-source (and free) image editing program.

Rating:
Summary: Is there anything that can stand up to it?!?
Review: Adobe Photoshop CS is a fantastic program, a must for any graphics designer, webpage designer, editor, ect.
It helps to have a little background info on how to create graphics but this is for the more advanced user.
Great program though a bit expensive.

Rating:
Summary: Superpowerful great program do not buy this!
Review: Do not buy this? But I just said it was a great program. Superpowerful why not buy this version? If you buy the standalone of Adobe Photoshop CS. You're basically blowing money. The price tag of this is almost $600. As with many of adobe standalone products individually, they cost a fortune. But you can buy the creative suite for less than a thousand, and with that, you get Adobe Acrobat. You'd adobe illustrator, PageMaker, etc.

Search for Amazon item number: B0006J2PTO for the premium edition.

Or search Amazon item number:B0000DBNHV for the Standard Edition.

And you'll see what I mean by the savings. As far as what this program can do, it can do anything when it comes to manipulating photographs adjusting color. This thing can take a bad photo one actually save it. You might also be interested in just getting adobe Photoshop elements 3.0. It has most of the features of Adobe Photoshop CS, but at a fraction of the cost less than a hundred.

Free photoshop tutorials
/www.80four.co.uk/tutorials/photoshop.html

Hope this review helped.

Have some fun and get it done


Rating:
Summary: One of the most influential inventions in history.
Review: Everybody talks of Photoshop simply as software. But it's implications in the modern day digital world are huge. Photoshop as an invention has been as influential as the light bulb, because it has changed our perception of reality. Today, every time we look at an image, say it's on a website, a magazine, television or any printed media, we wonder or contemplate the posibility of how much "Photoshopped" the image is. In the popular realm Photoshop can create crazy aberrations that are at times fun, and to the trained eye you can detect just where the editing took place. But in the hands of experts, we can just wonder how much media images have been manipulated without us ever noticing. What Photoshop has done over the years is to democratize digital image editing, something that was one time limited to high end image labs and pros. Photoshop has no real learning curve, because it's progressive. The thing is that if you're intrested, go for it, there are hundreds of learning resources available (tutorials included with the software are complete and comprehensive). Photoshop is a must have tool.

Rating:
Summary: Must Have
Review: I am lucky enough to use this software at no cost because I am taking a Multimedia class in school, the follow-up to my Digital Imaging Class I took last year. This is my first year using CS, last year we used Version 5.5. I enjoy working with this program because there is endless possibilities to create anything you so desire, of course you'd have to be familiar with the program and fairly advanced. I've tried many other Digital imaging programs and so far I'm sticking to my Adobe Photoshop CS

Rating:
Summary: Do they really think they can get away with this?
Review: I find this product and it's descendants quite lame. Who would want to use a program for raster graphics, then import the raster parts of an image over to the vector graphics program (Illustrator) just to create the final product. Why not have it all in one program? And, at a correct price range too? Since the "Creative Suite" is nearly 1500 dollars. When you can get all of that for 80 plus purchase 3rd party plugins such as: Flaming Pear, Kai's Power Tools, AlienSkin, etc.

You'd end up with an affordable solution for producing graphics without even making yourself or your company poor in the process.

I find that my graphics look better when produced with the Paint Shop Pro and 3rd Party Plugin combination.

You could either help the Adobe execs buy their yachts and beach-front homes or you could pay for what you are actually receiving.

It's just like the idea with Hondas compared to BMW's. If you buy a top of the line Honda, the differences will be negligible compared to what you will get with a BMW of the same class. Yet you will save A LOT of money.

Be smart, and don't buy from greedy corporations. That slowly jack up the price over the years just so they can quietly steal from the needy consumers.

They will probably release a new version in a year to just charge you 400 more dollars because it's cool to have the newest version. LOL

As always, Amazon.com rocks!!!

Rating:
Summary: Gotta love photoshop...
Review: I had PS 5.5. That is the one I learned in collage a few years back. I used it up untill a few weeks ago when my husband was rebuilding my computer and I used his. He has CS. It did take me a few days to get used to it, they made a lot of changes between 5.5 and CS. Good changes, once I got used to it anyway.

It does take some learning. Dont expect to take it out of the box and be an expert. I also would like to say that dual monitors helps a LOT, mostly because its nice to have all your tools, history, layers, and brush pallets open at once while still being able to see what you are working on. To learn, I suggest finding free online tuts. I have learned many tricks just recently by reading tuts on dA... Also just play with it. Thats basicly what I did in the class I took, I learned more by just playing around then anything else.

The price is really the only bad thing about CS, or PS in general. Thats why I gave it only 4 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Should you upgrade? It really depends.
Review: I have been using Photoshop since version 4.0, and to be honest, I still use 4.0 for some of my task. But, I have always made a leap to newer versions of Photoshop because of the new enhanced tools they offer to the user experience. Photoshop CS version 8 to me, is more of a Workgroup application, because basically thats where you will see and take advantage of the new features it has to offer. For users who might have made the sacrifice and bought a copy of Photoshop; 5, 6 or 7 for the first time, because they just wanted a strong, true professional image editing application, upgrading to this version will see no benefits.

However people who work in a commercial environment and depend on other applications such as Illustrator, Indesign and GoLive will benefit more because of the tight integration they share with each other. When these tools work together, features such as version cue which is only a part of the Creative Suite sold separately users will be able to manage different versions of content created by different users over a network.

Photoshop CS also has some new relief features for editing text easier than ever before and also for typing text on a path. The File Browser is even more productive, you can use the Photo-Merge to create panoramas,the file browser also allows you to create Web Photo Gallerys and Picture Packages. But Photoshop continues to be a tool that offers expert image editing with tools such as the Healing Brush introduced in Photoshop 7. Photoshop CS also introduces the Camera Raw Plugin as a built in part of the application (Photoshop 7 users can acquire this plugin for an extra $100), the plug-in offers support for working with images at 16-bit resolution. You can also turn images into PDF Presentations and Photoshop CS gives users a History of actions done on any work in the application.

I continue to stress that for a first time user, Photoshop is not a application to get a hang of easy, it is recommended you buy a book that teaches you from the ground up, where you can get the basic understanding of how Photoshop works. Its also best to go to a lesson class in Graphic Art and Digital Imaging where you can learn in a more interactive environment and get a much deeper knowledge and gain more experience in using the application more effectively and efficiently.

For users who want some of the power of Photoshop CS but much cheaper, Photoshop Elements is an excellent choice that offers great value for its features and ease of use in comparison to Photoshop CS. So, for persons such as Digital Photographers, Graphic Artist, Design Shops, Ad Agencies with designers within a workgroup environment, Photoshop CS is a worthy upgrade. But,if you are serious about digital imaging and editing and need a robust tool that can take your images to new heights both old and new then this is the one. But if you are fixing a wrinkle, brightness or two in a photo, stick with your present copy of Photoshop or purchase Photoshop Elements, to put it simple enough, Photoshop CS depends on your work ethics, which means meeting deadlines, in a workgroup, working with other Creative Suite applications such as Illustrator CS, Indesign CS and GoLive CS.