http://typophile.com/node/30087

Cross-posting all-round. :^D

As much as I wanted to be excited by this—because I have it running, and it's great—I'd much rather see betas of Indesign and Illustrator to hold us over until the final CS3 release. Both programs have some serious issues on Intel macs, and I'd love to get some stuff done without all my type suddenly shifting from 10 points to 9.87234632 points.

Miss Tiffany Yeah, I realized that there was a previews post started right after I submitted this, made amends to cross-post.

Jpad I STRONGLY agree with that statement. I would love to see what they have in store for Illustrator –my primary program of choice– but, seeing as Photoshop is Adobe's flagship, it makes sense that they're releasing a beta preview of this first! In time my friend, in time...

http://typophile.com/comment/reply/30100/173609

:-D Could not resit.

My guess is that all Adobe apps will have a unified interface in CS3 & by posting a PS-beta Adobe is going to get a lot of feedback on this, and will be able to finetune it.

Well, since this seems to now be the active PS CS3 post [mildly grouchy], I'll post my very brief impressions here.

I haven't had a chance to dive into all of it yet, so I thought I'd look to see if the typography features in CS3 have changed from CS2. Unfortunately, it seems that with CS3 installed, I can't load CS2 anymore (not that I really mind), so I'll have to go by memory.

A big change is the interface. Now, by default, the character and paragraph palettes are docked as icons next to the other palettes.

As for the character and paragraph palettes, they seem mostly the same.

The flyout menu for the character palette does say "Faux Bold" and "Faux Italic," which, if it wasn't there before, is an improvement. I don't remember either if the paragraph palette had Justification and Hyphenation options from its flyout, but those are there too, the same as in ID except for no hyphenation slider.

One new feature that may come in typographically handy are Smart Filters, which is an upgrade to CS2's Smart Objects. For those not in the know, when PS creates a smart object from a layer, it creates an embedded file within the original file with the layer's contents. In CS2, you could transform, warp, and apply blending modes and layer styles to the smart object, which would re-render itself each time you applied one, meaning that you didn't lose any of the layer's information with each new effect.

Now, filters can be applied to smart objects. This means that you can apply tons of filters and transformations without losing the editability of text, just like in Illustrator (albeit less seamlessly and without Illustrator-specific effects and filters). The first picture below shows the text "Hello" in Myriad Pro that I applied the Mosaic and Ripple filters to. The next picture shows the same layer after I opened the smart object layer and changed the text to "Bye" in Chaparral Pro. As you can see, the filters are reapplied to the new text, and they can even be separately masked and turned off by clicking on the eyes next to them in the layers palette.

That's about it as far as typography is concerned, to my knowledge. There are a lot of other terrific new features, like the great upgrades to Bridge, the Clone Source palette, the Quick Select tool, and Refine Edges. One tiny change that I'm very happy with is that they added to the Image Size dialog next to Bicubic Smoother "(best for enlargement)" and for Bicubic Sharper, "(best for reduction)." Since I've never been able to remember which to use when, this is going to make my life much easier.

I'm already using CS3 to wrap up my semester final, and performance on Mactel machines is great. Once activated, startup time is incredibly quick-hopefully this means no more going to get coffee while I wait for software to load like I've been doing since CS2 came out. Even better, Photoshop is finally using the graphics processor—or at least that's the rumor, which is supported by a GPU section under the performance perferences. Why should my background apps take a performance hit just because I'm running a filter than can be done by a pixel shader?

Like Auric, I'm pretty much in love with smart filters. This alone will be a feature that pays for the entire CS3 suite by saving designers countless hours of time.

The interface is interesting. Adobe clearly learned a lot from all they people they pissed off with the After Affects 7.0 interface, and they were a lot more careful with the new Photoshop. It's still a blatant knockoff of Final Cut, but not nearly so annoying.

Bridge fans aren't as lucky as Photoshop fans. Bridge is even more of a pig than it used to be. Doing nothing with it soaks up somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 megs of RAM, and it tends to respond pretty sluggishly to the user. It's still built around organizing/navigating massive libraries of media with metadata and keywords, but does anyone really work that way? There's a nifty new loupe tool similar to the one in Aperature/Lightroom, but it only works in modes where you get a tiny preview window jammed into a corner, and not in the light table mode where it would actually be useful. Hopefully the CS4 release will see some serious adjustments made for the benefit of people with established workflows, as opposed to people who work how Adobe thinks we should.

Though I can't comment on Bridge and Photoshop's speed, since I think most of the issues there are on Macs, I actually find the improvements to be terrifically useful. The Filter panel lets you sort instantaneously by just about any criteria you want, so no need to use Find very much anymore. The Metadata panel is much more accessible, looking like a camera's display. And the Slideshow finally lets you zoom in!

That said, I've been using Bridge as an essential part of my workflow for a while, but Bridge 2.0 doesn't do much different, so if you're not using 1.0 now in some capacity, you might not be convinced. At the least, though, if you've been using the OS's built-in file browser for file management, Bridge, I've found, is a big step up in utility.

At the least, though, if you’ve been using the OS’s built-in file browser for file management, Bridge, I’ve found, is a big step up in utility.

That probably has a lot to do with why I'm not a big bridge fan. It's a nice tool, but between Finder and Spotlight Macs do a much better job in the file browser department than Windows, so unless I need to sift through a bunch of image thumbnails, I just leave bridge off.

Here's a nice video that talks about the palette changes in CS3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO4Y6TwKBpQ

Some of you have noticed that clicking the palette icons brings out a fly out full view palette, this can be set to auto collapse thru the preferences menu. You can essentially have a single column of all the palettes on one side of the screen, organized as you like and reduced to Icon view to allow for maximum screen real estate for the project window (selecting Maximized Screen Mode further enforces this). A single column for your Tools palette on the other side. So, instead of shuffling palettes around, your workspace is streamlined for maximum work conditions. Gotta love it.

Here you can see with the Layer's palette flyout:

Link to larger view: http://img160.imageshack.us/my.php?image=workspacemz6.jpg