Very first Photoshop CS3 impressions

I’ve got CS3 on the laptop, a Windows XP machine. Here are my first impressions of Bridge and Adobe Raw Converter. I'll talk about Photoshop itself in a later entry.

Bridge has the look of Lightroom now—gray background, round slider tabs, many, many windows. Fortunately, you can drag the various panes and make them tabbed in a single window so that you can actually use the program on a small laptop screen.

You can import directly from your CF card into Bridge now. It’s a pretty fast download, though you have to wait for the entire card to download before you can start scrolling through the previews. Photo Mechanic is still a more efficient choice. A big problem, perhaps a bug, is an inconsistant auto-rotate during the ingest. For some reason, everything came in as a vertical when I tried it.

The new Bridge has problems reading the sidecar files from raw files adjusted in CS2. Adjustments show up on the preview, but not on the thumbnails. Rebuilding the cache does not make a difference.

You know that interminable "leave me alone, I’m busy" circle thing in Bridge in the lower left corner? It’s still there, but it lets you know how busy it is. It lists the "Pending jobs" yet to complete. It’s like those phone hold recordings that say, "You estimated wait time is 21 minutes." One alleged benefit of this upgrade is that Bridge is a much faster load. I'm not so sure yet how true that is.

Here are some changes in Adobe Raw Converter.

Some great features from Lightroom have been included in ACR, like the Recovery and the Fill Light sliders. These are the two adjustments missing in the current ACR that drive me to other RAW converter programs. The Vibrance slider (the Velvia slider) from Lightroom is also included. Other features also imported from Lightroom are the new tone curve adjustments and hue-sat adjustments specific to color.

The presets drop-down has been moved to its own tab. This is unfortunate. The first thing I do is add my camera calibration profile to an image. Now I have an extra step. These presets are also available in the right arrow menu, and there appears to be a means to automatically apply presets to a specific camera serial number or ISO setting.

I hope this is just a bug, but the ACR window is bigger than my laptop screen, and there’s no way to alter the size of the ACR window. The resize thingy in the lower right corner does not work. By hiding my toolbar and nudging up the view of the window I can uncover most of the Open and Done buttons.

I often open up a hundred or more images at a time for batch corrections in ACR. The new version really sluggish when you do this. Actually, it seems to be more sluggish no matter what. I managed to crash the program when I synchronized a batch of selected images before the program registered the settings I was wanting to sync.

Here is a more detailed review of Bridge and ACR by Uwe Steinmueller on outbackphoto.com.

Comments

[Jeff Henderson]

Doug,

In order to have your RAW file edits show up in CS3 thumbnails, do the following. Select Edit | Preferences. Select Thumbnails from the list in the dialog box. Under 'When Creating Thumbnails Gererate:'
Select the radio button next to 'High Quality Thumbnails'. You should now see the edits you made in CS2's Capture RAW in CS3 Bridge thumbnails.

Jeff H

[Scott Neumyer]

I had the same problem with opening ACR on my laptop. It simply won't fit on the screen, and my patience waned pretty quickly trying to fiddle around and make it fit.

Hopefully it's just a bug that'll get worked out sooner than later. It was, nevertheless, enough to get me to stop using the CS3 Beta for now.