That didn't take long. There's a new version of Adobe Raw Converter out, and you need it. It might, just might, make CS3 a viable upgrade.
The big changes are new adjustment options in sharpening, noise reduction, sensor artifacts and mid-tone contrast enhancement.
On the sharpening side, there are some sophisticated masking options now to protect smooth areas, as well as a Detail setting to reduce halo artifacts. It's all far deeper than Unsharp Mask in Photoshop proper.
There's a Defringe control now to handle those nasty specular highlight artifacts--you know, those magenta halos around sparkly water or high contrast edges. I've spent hours fixing those on final files. Maybe I never have to again.
The Midtone Contrast Enhancement that I wrote about last year, from the Epson seminar, used a complicated Overlay Blending mode with a High Pass filter. Now it's a simple slider called Clarity.
There are additional updates to CS3 (use the Update under the Help Menu to get them all at once, and have them automatically installed, or go here) that I am curious to check out. Particularly, can I batch process a gazillion files now without CS3 choking? I can tell you that the one-second delay on the Recovery and Fill Sliders in XP Pro is still a problem--I'm guessing the program is doing a ton of on-the-fly analysis of the image. Is this an issue on the Mac side anyone?
These are some powerful additions to Raw processing. It may be time to leave CS2 behind. I have 800 files to process tomorrow--I'll let you know.
An overwhelmingly detailed description of the changes can be found on Jeff Schewe's post in Photoshop News. Check it out.
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