I’ve been using Photoshop CS5 since it first became available and I’ll sum it up briefly: it’s a welcome change from CS3 and I’m glad I skipped CS4 and waited it out. So far it feels like a much more polished and well put together program than CS4 did, and it’s been running very nicely.
The slightly less brief form follows…
Really good things:
- The new interface is a lot more refined but certainly doesn’t feel foreign.
- Images that are separated from the main window appear in the Windows task bar and overall window management makes it a lot easier to find that file you’re looking for when you have a bunch open.
- Content aware things tend to be very useful.
- Being able to use more RAM has already come in handy quite a few times… yay for 64 bit support.
- So far it has yet to forget the fact that my tablet is pressure sensitive, something that CS3 liked to do from time to time.
- Bridge opens up really quickly! While it’s true that it never really closes, it seems to spend its time in the background hogging up less than 8MB of RAM and using 0 CPU so I can’t complain about the resident Bridge background task.
Not so good things:
- The new splash screen. It’s just weird.
- Dodge & burn is still hinky. While the updated dodge & burn tool that was first introduced in CS4 (and carries over in CS5) was an improvement, I still prefer my soft light or overlay layers. One major reason for this is that using those layers is a nondestructive process. Come on Adobe, this isn’t the chemical darkroom anymore, we don’t need to start over again if we screw up dodging & burning.
- Importing files with Bridge is a no-go for me (just like with ACDSee) because it won’t let me choose the folder naming structure of my choice. I really don’t feel like renaming every folder in my digital photo archives on my main drive or my backups so changing the naming structure now because of these stupid limitations is not going to happen. I’ll just keep using Canon ZoomBrowser to import images from memory cards if I have to! Is it really so hard for a program to allow me to use a \YYYY\YYYY_MM\YYYY_MM_DD\ structure? sheesh
Aside from those minor niggles, I really don’t have any real gripes with CS5 yet, and aside from the silly splash screen those aren’t unique to just this version of the software. I’m not generally particularly forgiving on Adobe since they’re so lazy & and their software is expensive but I am satisfied with Photoshop CS5. Illustrator CS5 introduces enough new things that baffle me still but I haven’t had a real project to take on in it yet.
I do wonder what the future of Photoshop will be; with Lightroom gradually taking over for a lot of users and adding more and more powerful features, I suspect fewer and fewer photographers will be spending time in Photoshop (and in fact I know this is already the case for some people).
There are a lot of features in CS5 that I haven’t even gotten to yet, including plenty which I have used in CS3 in the past. I just haven’t had the time to go through those and test things out to see how they work. When I do I’ll post what I find but for the time being these will have to do as my initial reactions to CS5.
