Adobe Photoshop CS5
The Adobe Photoshop family of products is the ultimate playground for
bringing out the best in your digital images, transforming them into
anything you can imagine and showcasing them in extraordinary ways.
Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended
Get all the state of the art editing, compositing, and painting
capabilities in industry-standard Adobe Photoshop CS5 software plus
tools that let you create and enhance 3D images and motion-based
content.
Adobe Photoshop CS5
Take advantage of powerful new photography tools and breakthrough
capabilities for superior image selections, image retouching, realistic
painting, and a wide range of workflow and performance
Performance
For users who didn't make the jump to CS4, the new version of Photoshop
will feel like it's got jet boots on. It opens faster, opens complex
raw, PSD, and TIFF images faster, and processes faster. There are still
noticeable lags during resource-intensive tasks, but without a doubt it
feels like a better-performing version.
As noted above, CS5 is fully compatible with Mac x64, although it won't
run on legacy PowerPC computers or any version of OS X older than
10.5.7.
Windows XP users should have Service Pack 3, whereas Vista users are
recommended to use at least Service Pack 1. Of course, Photoshop is
compatible with Windows 7 as well. The minimum requirements for basic
Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop CS5 Extended are fairly rigorous, so if
you've got an older computer it's recommended that you make sure it's
compatible before purchasing.
Enhanced 3D tools remain the clearest difference between regular
Photoshop and Photoshop CS5 Extended.
If you don't need them, don't get the more expensive version. If you do,
though, there are several notable new features. Adobe Repousse
streamlines the process for converting 2D artwork into 3D, then provides
a bucketload of options for altering the design. There's nothing
revolutionary here except a reasonable, solid effort at reducing
workflow. It's effective, and it's hard to argue with less than six
steps to creating a 3D letterform.
Photoshop Extended users will get an equally quick workflow for adding
realistic textures to 3D models. The program comes with a stack of
textures, which users can edit and save as their own, as well as create
custom textures from scratch and download new ones off the Web. There's
also new options for introducing image-based lights for dynamic light
sourcing on complex models, shadow capturing, and improved raytracing.
Much like the painting tools, the 3D options are not a full-on
replacement for a 3D renderer, but they will do quite admirably for
users looking to regularly add 3D pop to their art without having to
shell out for a modeling suite.. . .
