Nontrivial Exercises

Adobe Photoshop CS3 (almost) Public Beta

Two days ago Adobe announced it’s first-ever public beta of a Photoshop release, CS3. It’s only almost public because Adobe is granting beta licenses only to currently registered license-holders of Photoshop CS2. While this makes some good sense for Adobe to limit the beta of perhaps the most popular - and possibly the most pirated - third party application on the market, it is disappointing for us mortals who cannot afford the hefty price tag of the Creative Suite products and who respect licenses and want to abide by the law.

Perhaps the most anticipated feature of Photoshop CS3 is its native compatibility with Intel Macs. Right now Intel Mac users of Photoshop have to slog through the slowness of real-time translation with the Rosetta utility. I’ve heard that it’s actually faster to run the Windows version of Photoshop CS2 in a Parallels virtual machine on an Intel Mac than running it as a Mac app with Rosetta.

For me, though, it doesn’t really matter because I still can’t afford it.

I am impressed, though, with the work that Adobe has been doing on photography applications. I have been working with the (true) public beta of Lightroom for about a month and really like what they have done. Lightroom - and Apple’s Aperture, for that matter - offer so many tools to work with RAW images as well as some additional basic yet essential modification tools that you don’t need an app like Photoshop as much as perhaps you used to. Now that I have a Digital SLR and can shoot in RAW, I find that I can use something like Lightroom or Aperture for almost all the image processing that I need to do. For more specific or detailed changes, I use Gimp, the free open-source image editor that’s a pretty decent alternative to Photoshop.

Lightroom is available as a public beta - yes, for anyone to use - on both Windows and Mac platforms. The beta of Photoshop CS3 is also available for Windows and Mac platforms. Both can be downloaded from the cool Adobe Labs page.