Okay, I've just got to jump up and down and say how happy I am here. I haven't been this excited for a release since the anticipation of Super Mario Brothers 3 when I was a kid. "Mario can actually fly now!!!" - remember the movie about that video game championship where we got a preview. {takes moment to reflect on happy days of childhood}
... anyway - so I'm pretty happy about this!!
I'm on the intel mac now and photoshop via rosetta is painfully slow. Usable, but just barely. And I do a ton of photoshop on my images. I can't wait for brushes to paint in fluid real-time again.
They released the PS3 Beta which was awesome, except that intel macs don't draw the circle around the brushes. {beat head on desk} - not intentional but a real bummer since 99.9% of my PS work is either the clone stamp or the brush. Kinda hard to paint having no clue how big of an area you'll effect.
I'm looking forward to using non-destructive filters, a much improved curves dialog, and that new B&W conversion is as they say "totally off da' hook, yo!". Did I mention it'll be a whole lot faster?
My real excitement is going to InDesign for album designs. My friend is a layout designer and swears by InDesign and he's used Quark and all the others. The integration of ID3 with PS3 and Bridge3 looks incredible. Totally seamless. You can now drop a layered PS PSD file right into ID. If at any time you change the original PSD file (open it alone or just double click it in ID to launch it back into PS) - the ID layout automatically updates.
This means you could drop a bunch of un-edited images into a book layout, send a proof to a client, once it's okay, you just click, edit, save, on each image in the layout that needs work - and with non-destructive filters in PS (you could always dupe layers before, so this isn't a new abillity, just a much easier way to do it) - you can say, adjust sharpening or that "softy" layer you saved - directly from the album layout once the image is in place. You can do the same with the B&W tool which works as an adjustment layer - Go back and fine tune B&W tonallity - right from the album layout. Sweet!!
I currently use PhotoJunction for design but it's a bit buggy and has a ways to go. Totally usable and done many books with it, but certainly not my favorite piece of software. Using InDesign to layout, Bridge to manage, and PS to edit much faster than I do today - it's actually going to be a pleasure working up album designs for people now!
I really think they've broken new ground in terms of usabillity, integration, and workflow. Today you really just need a Mac and Creative Suite (plus Lightroom) and you truly do have a 100% production environment. You don't need one single other piece of anything to do anything in the photography world.
-Suite3 includes Acrobat Pro which is easier than ever to use - so you can drum up sweet graphics and logos in PS, then drop straight to Illustrator (included in Suite Standard and it alone is _hugely_ improved over IL CS2) to create vector copies, then drop to InDesign to work up your forms, marketing materials, contracts, etc, anything - then drop that right to Acrobat Pro and make PDF's with fields a client can fill in - all in one click hops.
-InDesign also now sports one-click creation of xhtml pages from any layout. This I'll have to see to believe, but as I understand it, you can take ANY layout in ID (I'm thinking web photo gallery?) and it'll spit out an xhtml page - which can be linked up just like any other html web page and should be totally perfectly viewable on any modern browser with no need of flash. (Anyone have the skinny on xhtml, feel free to chime in - it's new to me, I'm just buzzin' from the hype of it, but I'll believe it when I see it).
-Bridge now has a super smart "Import from cards and rename anyway you like" feature, as well as a much improved and much smarter "batch rename".
-Bridge is now fast! I never understood how anyone used Bridge2 or ealier - my copy litterally took hours to load the thumbs of a wedding shoot export and even after it was done, it was horribly painfully slow "I remember my old 386 in gradeschool..." But now a folder of 1200 full size JPG's populates and becomes fluid smooth in a matter of a few seconds. tickitty-tickitty-tack - done. "Thanks Adobe!!!"
One thing that always got me over the years is how many little "extra" programs you needed to do eeeeeeverything. My old workflow end-to-end probably used 20 different programs from 15 different people. Now it all boils into essentially 2 programs "Adobe Suite" for the visual stuff and "Apple's Mac Apps" for all the organizational, planning, client, email tasks.
Given this will all simplify SO many things and shorten SO many chains of workflow and do it all while running faster, smarter, and with better tools - the sheer time savings in the first month alone make this suite worth three times the price they're charging.
So anyone else waiting by the mailbox for their copy to arrive - here's the gathering spot to himm and haww about how cool it's going to be.
And it wouldn't be a party without the naysayers - so smack-talk is also more than welcome.
