Photoshop CS2

First of all, a big shout out to Adobe for creating an awesome upgrade for Digital Camera owners. I still don't understand why you insist on installing Adobe ImageReady when I never use it and curse it when I accidentally double click a PNG and watch it take forever to load. However, you fixed one of the biggest problems for me. Changes to Orientation of RAW files were never persisted to the XMP MetaData files, but thankfully you now write the tag:

<tiff:Orientation>8</tiff:Orientation>

Which makes a world of difference cause lots of my photos previously edited with Nikon Capture 4 trashed this data, and I was unable to fix the problem in Photoshop CS1 or Elements 3.0. Now these changes will persist across machines, and stick around with my photos.

First impressions. Adobe Picture bridge is worth the upgrade alone. The new Camera RAW editor is great. But best of all, THANK YOU for allowing me to use a product that is infinitely more usable and polished than every other product on the market that can edit RAW photos. They all suffer from any kind of normal and intuitive user interface.

The bottom line is that unfortunately for me, and fortunately for Adobe, I will continue to shell out money for every upgrade till I feel that the art of Digital Camera Workflow is mature in these products. I think CS2 is a huge step forward, especially with the guidance of many of the auto settings for editing RAW photos that are great for quick and dirty "make this not look like a raw file" type editing. But I still think we have a long way to go.

If you are currently an owner of a product that qualifies for an upgrade I would easily recommend the CS2 upgrade. If you are not an owner, and can't or don't want to shell out $500 for the full version, I suspect most of the core feature for managing Digital Photos will arrive in a new version of Photoshop Elements 3.0.