March 2007 — News
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Pre-Release Report: Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended
3/28/2007—With the completely revamped education licensing program Adobe has now implemented with the launch of Creative Suite 3, K-12 schools are in a better position than ever to adopt higher-end graphic, publishing, and Web design tools, as well as video and motion graphics apps, and integrate them into the learning environment. So this week we'll be taking a look at the significant new features in the applications in the various Creative Suite 3 editions, starting off today with what is probably the most significant application of the bunch: Photoshop CS3 Extended.
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. For the K-12 market, the release also coincided with new licensing, adopted and adapted from Macromedia's previous practices, that allows schools to puchase 500 seats of the individual Creative Suite editions at about 1 percent the commercial price for that many licenses. (For example, the Master Collection, which would cost $1.25 million for 500 seats purchased individually, runs $12,500 for a schoolwide license and includes student and teacher home use. Please see the links at the end of this article for current K-12 licensing details.)
We took a brief look at Photoshop CS3 Standard a few onths back, as the public beta was released. 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.
It should be noted that this is a preliminary look at a pre-release version of Photoshop CS3 Extended, not a formal software review, so we won't be touching on any of the quirks or instabilities in the beta release that are likely to be weeded out prior to the final release. Instead, we'll focus on new features--especially those unique to the Extended version of Photoshop--and also look at preliminary performance benchmarks.
Performance, compatibility, Universal Binarification
Now, the the group probably most impacted by the release of Creative Suite 3 is the Mac crowd. 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.
- Test 1: A 4,000 x 4,000-pixel document was created, and on this document I applied 47 commands, including 28 individual filters and 19 image adjustments, layer and canvas transformations, and various other actions.
- Test 2: A 2,000 x 1,500-pixel document was created, with a variety of commands applied, including several canvas- and layer-based transformations in succession.
- Test 3: An 800 x 600-pixel document was created, and to that document every filter that ships with Photoshop (CS2) was applied, with the exception of Reduce Noise and Displace. The test also included transformations, selections, fills, and the manipulation of text.
As you can see, even in beta form--and even with the additional overhead the new version is carrying--Photoshop CS3 Extended is drastically outperforming Photoshop CS2 on the same hardware--especially against CS2 running in emulation mode under Mac OS X. (I have not tested Photoshop CS3 Extended running on Windows.)
