Adobe Photoshop CS2

Pros: Bridge really does make sense!

Cons: Only 2 (solved) and dropping the rating system.

Summary: I was initially shocked and grateful I had kept Photoshop CS on my machine. However, as I went through a tutorial at lynda.com, it all made sense. I recently downloaded the trial version of GoLive CS2, and between that, Illustrator, and Acrobat, you can work much smarter, not harder. As for the complaint about Bridge being slow, there is a tip in the User Forum about this and I don't find it a deterrent as my preference is to open Bridge with Photoshop.

I like the new features for Camera Raw since I do 85% of my digital shooting in Raw and there's a lot of work eliminated in the first step of opening the image in terms of options available for correction.

I was leery of SmartSharpen, but by George, it does work - I used my methods and compared them to SmartSharpen, and for all intents and purposes, this does do a bang up job.

The other problem I had was unrelated to Photoshop - Nikon overrode PS for opening a Raw file, but again, a trip to the User Forum provided a quick answer and fix.

I have found that the User Forums are much more useful than the info Adobe provides and the solutions work 99% of the time without having to place a call to Adobe (but their service is very good - for a price!).

I don't think the folks at Adobe intended this program to be run on antiquated machines, so if you're at the upper end of the limit, there will be problems with sluggishness, etc., in which case you should forget using it or upgrade to a newer system. I own a web design business and have tried just about everything - Photoshop cannot be beat with respect to achieving high quality images, consistently (believe me I receive some pretty bad scans and digital photos!).