Photoshop CS2 Details Leaked; Creative Suite 2 To Announce Monday

This past weekend someone at Adobe accidentally posted the press release announcing, and detailing the new features of, Photoshop CS2. The early posting did not go unnoticed.

As report­ed by both Think Secret and AppleInsider (the lat­ter claim­ing an exclu­sive a day after Think Secret broke the news), the press release was sched­uled for dis­tri­b­u­tion 4 April, when Adobe will pre­sum­ably announce Creative Suite 2 as well as CS2 ver­sions of all its point products–InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GoLive, and InCopy.

According to the press release, the fol­low­ing new fea­tures are built into Photoshop CS2:

• Spot Healing Brush for faster touch-up of blem­ish­es, red-eye, noise, blur­ring, and lens distortion.
• Smart Objects that func­tion sim­i­lar­ly to Illustrator CS’s sym­bols in that Smart Objects may be stored once and dupli­cat­ed, and an edit to the mas­ter updates all instances. Additionally Smart Objects are vec­tor illus­tra­tions that can be scaled and trans­formed with­out los­ing image quality.
• For video and film pro­fes­sion­als Photoshop CS2 fea­tures FireWire Previews that can be viewed on a tele­vi­sion mon­i­tor, non-destructive edit­ing, and sup­port for 32-Bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) images.
• Vanishing Point, which allows cloning, paint­ing, and trans­form­ing in perspective.
• Image Warping for fold, stretch, pull, twist, and wrap images into shapes ide­al for prod­uct pack­ag­ing design.
• More automa­tion, includ­ing task-based menu pre­sets, event-based scripts that exe­cute auto­mat­i­cal­ly when trig­gered by actions like sav­ing or print­ing, and Multiple Layer Controls that enable simul­ta­ne­ous edit­ing of mul­ti­ple layers.

Additionally, Photoshop CS2 will inte­grate into new Creative Suite 2 util­i­ties Adobe Bridge and Adobe Stock Photos.

Adobe Bridge is a beefed up ver­sion of Photoshop CS’s File Browser now capa­ble of multi-view file brows­ing and smooth inte­gra­tion across the Adobe Creative Suite 2 software–including, pre­sum­ably, InDesign CS 2.

Adobe is also launch­ing a stock pho­tog­ra­phy ser­vice, Adobe Stock Photos, acces­si­ble via Adobe Bridge that allows users to pur­chase from “five elite stock image providers” in a sin­gle interface.

A new Camera Raw 3.0 work­flow allows batch pro­cess­ing of RAW, JPEG, TIFF, DNG, and PSD files inde­pen­dent­ly of Photoshop.

“Photoshop CS2 push­es the enve­lope with pow­er­ful fea­tures and sim­pli­fied work­flows that pro­vide pho­tog­ra­phers and cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als the free­dom to deliv­er stun­ning images,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice pres­i­dent of Digital Imaging and Digital Video Products at Adobe. “In light of the four mil­lion dig­i­tal SLRs expect­ed to ship this year, more pho­tog­ra­phers than ever will be mak­ing Photoshop CS2 their dig­i­tal dark­room of choice.”

And now, they have a jump on what to expect.

Photoshop CS2 will begin ship­ping to U.S. and Canadian cus­tomers in May. Full retail copies are expect­ed to be priced at US$599, with upgrades from any pre­vi­ous ver­sion of Photoshop set at US$149. Pricing for Creative Suite 2 has not yet been announced.

Download the actu­al press release (PDF) cour­tesy of Think Secret here.

Read the Think Secret sto­ry.

Read the AppleInsider sto­ry.