Posted by Mike Maples on April 27, 2006 at 11:10 AM
I've been using RawShooter (first Essentials and now Premium) for my RAW processing ever since it came out. I do all that I possibly can in RawShooter and typically only clone or do some additional sharpening on resized images in Paint Shop Pro.
I looked at CS2 on a friends screen recently and it reminded me a LOT of RawShooter and VERY LITTLE of PS7 which was my previous version of PS. I never learned PS7 because it was so cryptic and I was so ignorant and too old to put much effort into learning it.
CS2 looks like something I could do and appears to be similar enough to RawShooter that the learning curve might not be too bad. Is there anyone who has made this move? Is it intuitive or am I fooling myself? I see lots of similarities but what are the major differences?
Mike, they are two very different tools. Photoshop has a raw converter component called ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) that is similar in functionality to RawShooter, but the main CS2 software adds a LOT more functionality to edit your images.
Hi Mike,
I think that what you have actually seen is ACR, the raw converter that Guy mentioned. PS CS2 overall has the same structure of the previous versions, but it has some very nice new featured (in particular, I love the Shadow/Highlight tool, the Smart Sharpen and the 16-bit support for all the major tools).
Because I only shoot RAW and have for years I was using Breeze Browser Pro for all my RAW conversions. Then came PS-CS2.. I was blown away by it. It is so much better then any of the previous versions.. But not cheap in the long run. However if all your work is in RAW, it might be worth giving it a try.
And yes, with any package such as PhotoShop there is a learning curve. But with time and practice you will find your workflow less and less time consuming.
Discussion
3 repliesI looked at CS2 on a friends screen recently and it reminded me a LOT of RawShooter and VERY LITTLE of PS7 which was my previous version of PS. I never learned PS7 because it was so cryptic and I was so ignorant and too old to put much effort into learning it.
CS2 looks like something I could do and appears to be similar enough to RawShooter that the learning curve might not be too bad. Is there anyone who has made this move? Is it intuitive or am I fooling myself? I see lots of similarities but what are the major differences?
Thanks for any help...
Guy
I think that what you have actually seen is ACR, the raw converter that Guy mentioned. PS CS2 overall has the same structure of the previous versions, but it has some very nice new featured (in particular, I love the Shadow/Highlight tool, the Smart Sharpen and the 16-bit support for all the major tools).
Because I only shoot RAW and have for years I was using Breeze Browser Pro for all my RAW conversions. Then came PS-CS2.. I was blown away by it. It is so much better then any of the previous versions.. But not cheap in the long run. However if all your work is in RAW, it might be worth giving it a try.
And yes, with any package such as PhotoShop there is a learning curve. But with time and practice you will find your workflow less and less time consuming.
Good luck
Martin