The Announced Announcement

In the second of Adobe's series of three announcements announcing CS5, we've now been given the full feature set of the latest updates, plus pricing information. (The third announcement will be "we're shipping CS5." Or maybe it will be the fourth. ;~)

From a photographer's viewpoint, the star of the show is Photoshop CS5. Basically, we get content-aware fill, puppet-wrap transforms, lens correction profiles, improved noise reduction and sharpening in the Camera Raw converter (which in itself seems improved), an improved HDR function, and 64-bit support on both Mac and Windows. A number of other small changes are in the update, as well, but if those first five I mentioned didn't whet your appetite, then the smaller changes aren't going to get you to update, either. Mac users should see performance increases due to the 64-bit and Cocoa-aware aspects (especially if you have plenty of memory), but this also means that PowerPC users are no longer supported: you need an Intel-based Mac to run CS5.

Coupled with the upcoming Lightroom 3, it appears Adobe is still giving photographers lots of love. I'm still not seeing real support for non-Adobe converters, though. Apparently Adobe wants to be the only one to touch your bits.

Photoshop CS5 is anticipated to be shipping in mid-May, with updates from CS2 or later costing US$199 (US$349 for extended version, even more for full suite updates). If you've got an earlier version of Photoshop (or Creative Suite), be prepared for paying full retail (US$699), as Adobe's current policy is to upgrade only going back three versions.

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