Since I ordered Photoshop CS (8.0) just barely after the cutoff date for a free upgrade to CS2 (9.0), my copy arrived last Friday. I ended up playing last weekend rather than writing up the Minimalism post-mortem I've been promising myself to write. I'll write about the upgrade instead, for now.

Before Photoshop CS, I used mostly the Gimp, but the lack of 16-bit support, decent RAW import, IPTC handling, independent color channel adjustments, focusing/sharpening tools, noise reduction tools, and alignment/distortion tools (basically the majority of the things I've now started to take for granted in my workflow) drove me to the dark side.

Notable improvements from CS:

RAW import drastically improved. Autodetection of correct values is very good, and gets me almost instantly to the baseline starting point that I normally required a minute or so of bumping sliders around to get, before I started fine-tuning. The autodetected values are used for the RAW files in the browser, as well, making it a lot easier to distinguish between underexposed or overexposed shots.

IPTC handling actually complies with the current IPTC specification now, which is nice. There's better editing control in the browser, as well.

The file browser is now effectively a separate application, which I much prefer (I prefer alt-tabbing to it or minimizing the entire PS window than trying to find the correct minimized title bar inside of PS itself). It's much less memory-hungry than the original built-in browser was when dealing with RAW files (I couldn't have the CS browser open while editing, as the system would grind to a halt, but the CS2 one is so lightweight I can forget that it's still open).

The file browser now has its own internal scoring system, making it very easy for you to go through several alternates of an image, do simple adjustments to see how it is working out, then keep only the top two that you liked.

Full support for DNG. I'm of mixed opinions on actually using this, since support isn't very widespread yet. As I understand it, the specification is fully open and royalty-free, however, so I expect it to take off, and then I will probably end up converting all of my RAW files to DNG to get away from proprietary EXIF handling once more tools support it. My only real concern is whether DPChallenge will accept a DNG in lieu of a RAW file as proof for a challenge.

There is a new lens correction filter that works in 16-bit mode that, had I known was going to be there would have saved me a $130 purchase of ImageAlign. It actually works better than ImageAlign does, as it has a much larger preview window, and a more visible grid.

More filters work in 16-bit mode. This doesn't affect me all that much, since I tend not to work much with fancy effects, but I know a lot of people were complaining about this in 8.0.

Some of the stuff you can do with HDR automation is a little scary. I'm still getting a grasp on how it works, but I'm starting to get tempted to autobracket +/- 1 stop on every tripod shot I take now, just in case I want to merge later. I may need to upgrade my storage first.

Disappointments:

Photomerge still only works in 8-bit, and the abysmal merge point detection and perspective compensation has not improved. I was very disappointed by this, as I had read earlier that it was going to at least handle 16-bit.

The noise reduction... sucks. Oddly, the chroma noise reduction in the RAW import tool works very, very well (and has since 8.0), better than Noise Ninja, in fact, but the luminance noise reduction is awful.

Overall startup time seems slower. Some operations are faster, others are slower, but overall the feeling is that the application has slowed down very slightly. It's not really enough to put my finger on any particular thing, though. If I have a memory leak, it's not a serious one. I've worked for several hours straight on it without closing it, and it was still running smoothly.

RAW import still doesn't allow you to save and load a limited subset of settings in a convenient way. The browser lets you trivially clone exact settings from another RAW file, however, and that lets me do most of what I generally want to do.

CS2 requires activation, which CS did not. I don't trust software that relies on a foreign network connection to install properly. If anything should happen to Adobe in the future, or they decide to stop supporting CS2, and I have to change machines, my shiny, well-protected CS2 CD will be so much worthless plastic. It's very tempting to go find a cracked version to keep as a backup just in case.

Although I upgraded from Photoshop CS in place, CS2 did not attempt to copy my settings. I had to go tweak a number of little things all over again.

The autoheal tool doesn't work anywhere near as well as I hoped. This may simply be because I was trying some very difficult manipulations (trying to edit out lights in between bits of fine detail).

Oddities:

The Layers interface has changed slightly. I'm not sure whether I like the CS2 style better or not yet. It's not changed so much that I can't figure out what to do, but it is different enough to throw me off a little and slow me down. Dragging is nice, but I hardly ever use it.

Things still to test:

I was meaning to look to see if I can do Shadows/Highlight adjustment in an Adjustment Layer now. Somehow, I forgot last weekend. (Update: You can't.)

I still need to play around with the new smart sharpen tool, and see if it's much better than what I currently use (Focus Magic, Photokit Sharpener). (Update: Lacks a way to click to change values by a small amount, but otherwise works better than Focus Magic because the preview window is larger.)

Overall, I'm very happy to have upgraded, which is an easy call for me since it was free. It sped up my "decide what images to keep and rename" section of my workflow pretty dramatically, and offered me a few minor tweaks in my editing that I like. My disappointments are mostly in the category of things I wished they would have fixed, rather than things that got worse, and the ones that got worse I can mostly work around.