Adobe has officially announced their latest offering Photoshop CS2 (I suspect the slip of information last week wasn't really an accident). This version promises more advanced features for the digital photographer.

There is no doubting that Adobe Photoshop is the king of imaging applications, it's streets ahead of the competition,In many respects this is not a healthy state to be in, competition keeps things fresh and innovative. Adobe does not fail in this respect, CS2 has many major improvements over 7 and CS, Adobe has kept its flagship well in front of the competition. I have used every version since version 2.0 (I still have all my copies). It is interesting to see how this product has grown from strength to strength. Version CS2 is the best version yet. I have been using it for about a month and I am impressed. Rather than repeat the Adobe press release, I am just going to look at some of the highlights.

Lens Correction;

This is probably the most important filter for digital photographers. The filter can be found under Filter > Distort. There are several options available including; Remove Distortion (for barrel and pincushion corrections); Fix Red/Cyan - Fix Yellow/Blue fringe (removes colour fringing); Vignette (corrects image falloff at the corners); Vertical Perspective (corrects converging verticals); Horizontal Perspective (Removes horizontal distortions) and finally Scale, use this to tidy up the image.

Before and After pictures	The Lens Corrections filter
Grid ready for image manipulation	Vertical manipulation applied

The Lens Distortion is far easier to use than the Crop tool with Perspective, the image is updated almost instantly. Use the grid to align the image and presto corrected images in next to no time at all. This filter will be indispensable to the architecture photographer.

Spot Healing brush

The healing brush has been a godsend for the portrait photographer, now an extra function has been added. The Spot Healing Brush was first introduced in Photoshop Elements 3. Use the brush to paint over an object you want to remove, this places a black blob over the image. The brush is a bit hit or miss, with small objects it works, with larger areas it may not.

The Spot Healing brush tries to find a similar area to copy over, the brush can be unpredictable. As you can see in the above samples, the pebbles were easily removed, by simply dabbing a spot on each stone. Removing the person on the beach took several attempts (more than I have shown here) and even then the last image would need some extra retouching.

Adobe Bridge

This is basically Adobe's File Browser on steroids. Unfortunately I couldn't get this to work on my Beta version, but thanks to Nick Scott for pointing out that Adobe bridge is a separate application and the file browser button shouldn't be on the top of the Photoshop screen with CS2. Adobe Bridge is a one stop centre for bringing in images to all the Adobe applications within Creative suite 2; Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, ImageReady and Photoshop, and it will also Open With... other selected applications.

Adobe Bridge offers many viewing alternatives to suite most users

Just in case you feel the urge to look at the official Photoshop CS2 page, here it is

14 June, 2005