Design for Money: Adobe Photoshop CS3 Impressions

Performance

Just to get it out of the way: the performance is pretty darned solid. It’s noticeably faster than Photoshop CS2 under Rosetta, especially when switching between Photoshop and another app. (And us web developers tend to do a lot of that.)

There’s a new ‘Performance’ section of the Preferences that lets you cap the amount of memory available to Photoshop (by default its memory cap is set at 75% of your system memory) and set up scratch disks. The pane also includes information on the GPU on your graphics card, which would imply that CS3 can use your graphics card to handle some tasks, relieving the load on your main processor(s).

But just when you think the improved performance is the biggest, most obvious change, that’s when you notice the new user interface. Photoshop CS3 offers the ability to dock palettes on the sides of your screen, which you can expand or collapse to save screen space. When you collapse a palette dock, the palettes inside it are still available as toolbar icons; clicking an icon brings up that one palette, which goes away as soon as you’re done with it.

Even the main Photoshop toolbox has gotten a new look: by default it’s arranged in a single vertical column, which frees up some horizontal screen real estate for your images. You can return to the old toolbox style by just clicking it title bar.

And in a nice little Mac-like touch, when you switch into or out of Photoshop, the palettes fade in and out smoothly rather than just disappearing and reappearing.