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Photoshop CS3 Demo

I’ve been playing with the demo version of Photoshop CS3 Extended for a little while now, and there’s a lot to like. Anyone interested in this topic will already know all about that because they’ll have read one of the thousands of reviews that are on the net and in the magazines. However, despite all the shininess, it’s been a frustrating experience for me so far.

I can consistently cause a complete crash - i.e., the program terminates completely, dies from my screen, with not an error in sight - simply by trying to use a motion blur at 90 degrees. In any file. On any layer. At any strength of blur. Simply entering 90 into the rotation field sends it in an unavoidable death spiral and the whole application disappears from my screen in under five seconds. This is not good. Then there is the glacial slowness of the new user interface. I have a Radeon 9600 Pro - an archaic card by todays gaming standards, but it’s fast enough to play Half Life 2 on, with the effects cranked up. Running Photoshop CS3 with it’s “hardware accelerated” interface turned on however is a nightmare of screen redraw and unresponsive interface. It’s slow like nothing I’ve seen since 1994. Turning this ‘feature’ off and falling back to the traditional CPU rendered interface brings things up to speed, but it’s still a lot slower than I’d expect when revealing pallets on hover (one of the new features). It takes a full second before the pallet appears, and a full second to disappear (I can watch the elements that make the pallet pop away in the ’screen re-draw on a slow system’ kind of way). And this is on an Athlon 2800+ with 1.5Gb RAM. Again, not a fast computer, but no where near “slow”.

Ok, so those are really my only two issues, and one’s nothing more than a bug that’ll get fixed (I hope). But the slow interface is a crime, and it marrs the entire experience. CS3 feels clunky and tired, when it should feel sprightly and new. That’s disappointing.

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Thu, 24th May 2007 at 19:05 UTC

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• My Two Cents

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