“Definitely Better than its Predecessor”

Category: Review on Adobe After Effects CS4 Professional Windows Upgrade

Posted by: 1-Aug-2009

Strengths: Quicker than its predecessor, workflow enhancements, well-streamlined interface.

Weaknesses: No print layout tools, installation is time consuming, no enhancements for masking features.

The Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Windows) was released as a successor to the Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Windows). This version justifies the intentions of the creators to create a better product than its predecessor. The Adobe Photoshop CS3 is a whole lot faster than the CS2. Loading and saving files can be done seamlessly and the start-up time has also been improved. The CS3 was found to be faster than the CS2 by sixty percent in one of the image processing tests.

Although, there are only very few extra features when compared to CS2, the already existing features have been enhanced to offer better performance. These enhanced features include Smart Filters, Refine Edge, a Quick Selection tool and Bridge CS3. The first feature applies traditional filters at render, rather than on the bitmap, thus resulting in nondestructive, re-editable effects. The Refine Edge feature groups selection-edge tweaking options in a single dialog with various types of previews, and the Quick Selection tool speeds up masking against certain types of backgrounds. Using the CS3 one can export images for Zoomify, which deconstructs images into smaller tiles and creates a small Flash movie. This movie can then be embedded into a Web page, thus enabling zoom-in on larger images.

The major disadvantage of the Adobe Photoshop CS3 is that the installation is painfully slow. But the brighter side is that installation is needed only once or twice, because the files are backed up in the memory for a long time. For professionals it is an attractive upgrade, but for those who don’t want to spend big bucks, it is better to go for less expensive options.