Problems with CS3?

[Ed Richards]

Anyone notice any serious problems with CS3? Is it ready for prime time work?

[Walter Calahan]

Personally I have experience any big problems yet, but then it hasn't been out very long. The RAW processor is more powerful, but it's interface with its lettered tabs a little confusing. Sometimes when I save a file to a different format, the name of the file changes to the previous file saved. Not a big problem because you can type in the correct name, but this shouldn't happen.

Give me a week or two really dig into it.

[chris jordan]

There's been a bug in Photoshop for all these years that I sure wish they would finally fix. It in the "advanced blending mode" dialog. When you exit that dialog, sometimes even not having made any changes, it freezes up and you can hear the scratch disk clicking around for minutes at a time. I have written the people at Adobe about it several times, to no avail. Maybe one of you beta testing guys can raise the issue...

[Kirk Gittings]

This may seem like an odd question, but it is important to something I have to do on a regular basis for architecture. Can you do Photomerge in 16 bit yet?

[paul stimac]

The only thing I really don't like is that they moved the feather command. It's now nested inside 'modify' under the 'select' menu. I suppose they did this to force you to use the new 'refine edge' instead?

[Marko]

Come to think of it, to feather is to modify the selection, and it should've been there before. Sounds logical to me.

Refine Edge is an interesting function and it seems to work well with Quick Selection, another new command that I am getting to like fast.

I just don't see what would be their interest in forcing anybody to use one command over the other. Photoshop has a history of providing multiple paths to anything that can be done.

To answer the original question: I have not encountered any bugs yet and the new version is very noticeably faster on Intel-based Macs. I'm currently running it on a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo 20" iMac with 2GB of RAM and everything appears nice, fast and smooth, from startup to filters. It is a clear thumbs-up for me.

On the other hand, it is still a Beta version and despite there being no obvious bugs, there are some rough edges that will most likely be ironed out in the final release. Overall, Walter is right, with a program of this complexity, it is too early to say with certainty if there isn't something hidden. The time will show.

[Jack Flesher]

Can you do Photomerge in 16 bit yet?

If you mean Photomerge stitches, yes and it's hellagood -- actually does essentially perfect stitches but still yields editable layer masks in 16-bit. Also now renders as flat or perspective correct, your choice :D

If you mean HDR merges, I don't a lot of new functionality.

To answer the original question, there are several bugz on my PC systems, especially in the print dialog.

[Eduardo Aigner]

Rotated images on Bridge don't show on the appearance pallete, and don't show on slideshows.

[Kirk Gittings]

Thanks Jack. I did mean stitches. I won't bother buying a separate plugin that will do stitches in 16 bit then.

[Kirk Gittings]

I downloaded it. there are some cool new features. As Jack mentioned the B&W conversion looks very promising and being able to do merges in 16 bit is a definite upgrade. There are quite a few changes that I can't quite figure out yet like not being able to move my pallettes to the second monitor etc. All of which I will figure out in time I am sure. I don't find PS or Bridger to run any quicker however, which is particularly disappointing with Bridge as it always took more time to perform a given task than the same task in any other method.

[Jack Flesher]

Thanks Jack. I did mean stitches. I won't bother buying a separate plugin that will do stitches in 16 bit then.

I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb here, but compared to some very expensive thrid-party software that do the same thing, the new functionality in CS3 is both SIGNIFICANLY faster and generates a superior mask.

To be more clear on speed, I blended 5 separate 16-bit 70MB tiffs, perspective corrected in about two minutes. (FTR: I have a 2-year old dual Xeon PC machine with 4G ram, 3Gig switch enabled in XP Pro. Note: I did need to reduce ram allocation from 100% to about 75% or 2G, and had to set cache levels to 6 (CS default) to make this tool stable on my machine. However, it runs equally well, just slower, on my dual core laptop with 2G ram, 1G assigned to CS3, cache at 6. IMO the fact I could even do it on my laptop was impressive.)

To be more specific on the mask, it is lined up at the pixel level and there is no blend(!); the two sides of the image match up to their neighbors like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle! You can edit the CS created mask and certainly add a blend, but so far I have not found a good reason to do so. The math they are using to decide where and how to do this is far smarter than I am :)

You can download CS3 Beta for a free trial.

Cheers,

[Kirk Gittings]

I agree with Jack on the new stitch plugin. Last week I tried all the available third party stitch programs because I wanted one that would do 16 bit. In the final analysis I prefer the CS3. Also the new Camera Raw has a great deal of more functionality than the previous version, incorporating a really superior curves and hue/sat interface. As well what seems to be an attempt to incorporate a slider ala Jeff Schwe for some additional highlight recovery.