Fast Photoshop CS2

During my years as a (US) Naval Flight Officer flying in the F-14A, I used an Olympus OM-10 to shoot lots of air-to-air photgraphs in the form of slides. Over the years, despite being stored in archival quality photo album pages, the slides have become dirty and discolored. Wanting to incorporate those photos into my digital collection and restore them to their former glory, I scanned them into my iMac using an Epson 1660 Photo flatbed scanner and Adobe Photoshop CS. I’ve been manually stepping through each slide and using the Healing Brush to remove the dirt and crud I haven’t been able to physically remove and have been using Photoshop’s color, contrast, and level controls to offset their discoloration.

I store the files in Adobe Photoshop’s native .psd format since that allows me to preserve the original scans and all of Photoshop’s options. I previously had converted a lot of the files from .psd to .jpg formats and had posted on my website for family members or friends to view, so I’m familiar with how Photoshop CS works with them. Last night, I started converting the final versions over to .jpg for web posting using Photoshop CS2; and I was pleasantly shocked at how fast CS2 did the job compared to CS. CS2’s conversions were almost instantaneous! CS had taken from one to three seconds on each one.

One of the reasons I had moved to CS2 was because of performance tests conducted by the Barefeats.com website that showed how CS2 coupled up with Tiger (Mac OS 10.4.3, in this case) to outperform CS. I can now speak from personal experience and vouch for that. As much as I hate Adobe’s use of activation (which is really aimed at controlling “casual copying” done by customers who BOUGHT their product), I have to say that the performance increase alone is worth the $150 upgrade cost.