I just loaded the Photoshop CS2 upgrade on my desktop. First impressions. Like every software upgrade I have ever encountered, my life is now more complicated. Habits and shortcuts that I had learned to ease my way through a procedure are defunct. A general rule of upgrades—what used to take one step now takes two or three. CS2 is no exception to the rule.
Images appear to load faster, but the program is still slower than Photo Mechanic. There’s a slider now to alter the size of the thumbnails. A nice touch is the ease of deleting files—once you pass the "Do you really want to do this" box and check to have it never bother you again, a hit of the delete key gets rid of a file without losing your place in the queue (in the previous FB, you’d have to select an image to see the next preview). Unbelievably, they got rid of the Flag key in the browser (excuse me, it’s called Adobe Bridge now). It makes the program much less functional as an image editor now.
Another huge annoyance is a new function for an old keyboard shortcut (and one universal in most Windows programs), Ctrl+D to deselect a current selection. When I have a bunch of files I have just done something with, like renamed them, or RAW processed them, Ctrl+D deselected the whole batch so you could do the next thing, like, select another file. Now it’s a "Duplicate File" command, making a copy of all the files you have selected. I could strangle the software engineer who did this to me.
The file-renaming function is hidden under a new menu item (Tools, instead of Batch), and it’s buggy. If you don’t both select the number of sequence characters and type in a leading 0 to match (01 to have the first file numbered "1"), the first number in your sequence will be 00, not 01.
I haven’t figured out how this happens yet, but I had a bunch of "Bridges" open in my status bar, that needed to be closed one by one. Closing Photoshop does not close Adobe Bridge. The Upgrade Rule—two steps where there used to be one.
In RAW processing, everything is by default set at Auto at settings you would never pick. As soon as I can, I will figure out how to turn this off.
I will have much more of a rant, and maybe something nice to say, to follow. This is just my first hour with the program. Stay tuned.
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