Hi,
I'm a professional retoucher and photographer, and recently joined RetouchPro.
I've used Photoshop every day for years and I'm dismayed at how much of a rip-off each new upgrade has become. I'm presently using version 7, and checked out CS2 to see if it was worth upgrading.
I was disappointed at how little it has to offer me. As a professional user I use about 0.5% of its vast mountain of features. A few that are essential to me have been left to rot for years: It still has the same crappy unsharp masking. Image interpolation hasn't changed. The brushes dialog is impressive, but still of little use to me, and does not address what I need at my fingertips, daily.
I know that there are many users who love to experiment and enjoy some of the astonishing filters and features that Photoshop is packed with. Most of the images I work on for clients, however, have to appear totally real and show no traces of being worked on. For me it boils down to a pressure-sensitive pen and mountains of laborious layer masks.
There were only two things that I could see being of use to me: support for raw files (for some reason all the rage now with photographers), and a more advanced transform feature.
Annoyingly I will HAVE to upgrade to CS2, simply because of the raw file support. The advanced transform feature is still clumbersome to use - it's fine for creative playing about, but doesn't do what I need most.
For me this is only version 7.5, but I would not have minded paying a modest upgrade fee. I feel that Adobe are on the make, and not even pretending to cater to an established core group of professional retouchers.
I realise that this criticism may seem like sour grapes from a specialist user. But I am one of many thousands, worldwide, that Adobe has neglected for years.
I'm a professional retoucher and photographer, and recently joined RetouchPro.
I've used Photoshop every day for years and I'm dismayed at how much of a rip-off each new upgrade has become. I'm presently using version 7, and checked out CS2 to see if it was worth upgrading.
I was disappointed at how little it has to offer me. As a professional user I use about 0.5% of its vast mountain of features. A few that are essential to me have been left to rot for years: It still has the same crappy unsharp masking. Image interpolation hasn't changed. The brushes dialog is impressive, but still of little use to me, and does not address what I need at my fingertips, daily.
I know that there are many users who love to experiment and enjoy some of the astonishing filters and features that Photoshop is packed with. Most of the images I work on for clients, however, have to appear totally real and show no traces of being worked on. For me it boils down to a pressure-sensitive pen and mountains of laborious layer masks.
There were only two things that I could see being of use to me: support for raw files (for some reason all the rage now with photographers), and a more advanced transform feature.
Annoyingly I will HAVE to upgrade to CS2, simply because of the raw file support. The advanced transform feature is still clumbersome to use - it's fine for creative playing about, but doesn't do what I need most.
For me this is only version 7.5, but I would not have minded paying a modest upgrade fee. I feel that Adobe are on the make, and not even pretending to cater to an established core group of professional retouchers.
I realise that this criticism may seem like sour grapes from a specialist user. But I am one of many thousands, worldwide, that Adobe has neglected for years.
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