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Photoshop CS Review
If you haven't already heard a hundred times by now, Adobe has announced that the next version of Photoshop won't be called Photoshop 8 but instead will bear the name "Photoshop CS." That's CS for Creative Suite since Adobe has reached new heights in integrating their products so that they now not only all work together, they share the same name.
 More importantly for photographers though, CS is a huge release with lots of great stuff.
One of the features a lot of folks have been waiting for is finally here: Photoshop will now support 16-bit editing almost everywhere. No more being forced to convert to 8-bit just to run a built-in filter or make a selection.
CS will also include a great collection of photographic filters. Wish you had used an 81A filter when you shot an image? Apply a reasonably close equivalent after the fact in Photoshop. And you can do it on an adjustment layer so you can edit afterwards. Now that's handy.
Histograms in Photoshop will now be in color, showing you separate red, green and blue channels plus the composite. This will provide much better information for making adjustments than we used to get. And the histogram can be displayed real-time on a palette. Very cool.
For digital shooters, an updated version of the Camera Raw plug-in is built in. For those who did not spend the $99 Adobe wanted for the plug-in by itself, you've saved more than half of what the full Photoshop CS upgrade will cost you.
But there's plenty more. The file browser has been enhanced to an amazing degree and now functions almost like a full blown application by itself. You can now type text on a path. There's a great highlight/shadow correction feature, an easy way to match color between different images, and a panoramic stitching tool. Add to that an enhanced Web Photo Gallery and Picture Package (contact sheet) capability, a Filter Gallery for applying multiple filters at the same time more easily, an automatic crop and straighten feature, enhanced scripting capability and more.
Visit Adobe's website for the full scoop. The new release is expected to ship in the second half of November.
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