Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta released

Adobe today released a public beta version of their Photoshop CS3 software. It is available from the Adobe Labs Homepage both for Windows and Mac. You’ll have to register in order to download the 650MB file to your harddisk. The Beta will run after entering a valid CS2 serial number into the startup-screen. Otherwise you have the option to run it in trial-mode which is said to last 30 days. In fact, sources report the trial-version will expire after 2 days so you’ll probably have to modify your system clock in order to expand this trial to the promised 30 days 😉

The good news about Photoshop CS3 is it´s in universal binary which means it will run natively on Intel-powered Macs. So now you can forget about „Rosetta“. The bad news is, I lack an Intel-based Mac so I can´t compare the speed improvements over the CS2-version running in emulated mode. Well, it´s christmas soon, so if anyone feels like buying me a new Mac to do these benchmarks, don´t hesitate 😉

On my G4-Powerbook the Photoshop-Beta runs as fast as the older version. GUI looks refurbished, a little cleaner and sports a new color scheme with more (darker) greys and blue. To me it looks similar to the iTunes-7-surface. You can collapse the palettes on the right side of the screen very easily now to get more space for your picture. Probably one of the most exciting new features is the ability of applying „Smart Filters“ to your layers. Photoshop will convert your layer into a „Smart Object“ to like having a copy of the original data stored in the background. Then you can add filters to this layer and will always be able to modify the settings or even completely delete the filtering effect.

If you´d like to learn more about the Photoshop CS3 Beta, you´ll find a lot of screenshots and tutorial videos on NAPP´s page.

Just one of their screenshots showing the improved „Curves“-dialogue with a histogram-overlay