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Software Preview
Hands On with Photoshop CS3 Extended
A preliminary report on new features, performance, and workflow enhancements
3/27/2007
As a campus IT person, you might want to consider hiring a bouncer and putting up a velvet rope in front of your office. In a few hours, every department head and faculty member on your campus is going to be lined up with a requisition form in hand demanding the same thing from you: Adobe Creative Suite 3. The reason? Photoshop CS3 Extended, mainly.As Adobe announced earlier this month, its most widely used creative application--and one of the most widely used applications period--has ben split into two versions: Photoshop CS3 Standard and Photoshop CS3 Extended.
We took a brief look at Photoshop CS3 Standard earlier in the year, as the public beta was released. And you've probably had some time to play with it yourself by now. (If you haven't you might want to retake the aptitude test that led you into computer software in the first place.) But the Extended edition is a much more radical advancement in graphic design software, incorporating all of the new features, improvements, and compatibility updates, but adding in new specialized features for 2D and 3D designers, motion graphics artists, video editors, engineers, and even medical professionals.
We've had our hands on this Extended edition for a couple months now and can finally share all of the details with you in this, our first installment of hands-on previews of the new applications in Adobe Creative Suite 3. We'll take a look at Photoshop CS3's new performance improvements (including preliminary benchmarks) and new features exclusive to the Extended edition.
Performance, compatibility, Universal Binarification
Now, the first group that's going to come slithering up to your office door is the Mac users. They have, after all, been stuck in Adobe limbo for more than a year now, waiting for Intel-native versions of Adobe's creative software. And now, here it comes, all at once, with Photoshop CS3 Extended at the vanguard.
Both Photoshop CS3 Standard and Photoshop CS3 Extended--along with most other apps in the various Creative Suite editions--are now offered as Universal Binaries, meaning that they're natively compatible with other PowerPC- and Intel-bsed Mac hardware. (Some of the apps, such as Premiere Pro, Encore, and a couple others run only on Intel-based Mac hardware and do not support PowerPC-based Macs.)
So what does this native compatibility mean for Mac users?
Performance.
While I'm loath to perform benchmark tests on beta software, I have to make an exception in this case because all of my benchmarks are favoring this beta over the previous full release of Photoshop (CS2) on Intel-based Mac hardware and pretty much anything else I've tested previous releases of Photoshop on.
Here's the way it looks.
I ran three extensive tests comparing the performance of Photoshop CS3 Extended against Photoshop CS2 running on both Mac OS X and Windows XP Professional SP2 on exactly the same machine (an Intel Core Duo-based MacBook running at 2.0 GHz). Here re the details of the tests.
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