Responding to the comments on CS2 - I've been working with it this weekend. It's going to be a while before I get a handle on just how much more powerful this program may be.
There are a couple features in ACR that haven't been mentioned. One is the crop tool, so you can crop before you do the conversion. The other is a quick way to rotate a tilted horizon. If you worked with Dr. Brown's Image Processor script, you'll be happy to find out it's now built into Adobe Bridge (the replacement for the browser) Batch conversions run in the background. That's pretty big. You can place a raw file as a "smart object" into a Photoshop file. This doesn't seem all that important until you realize it works somewhat like adjustment layer, in that you can go back and tweak the raw conversion anytime you want. I'm absolutely convinced that I have no grasp of just how powerful Smart Object's will become. And if that's not enough to make you believe Adobe was thinking hard about this upgrade... here's a big one. If you convert your raw files to DNG files there is a big bonus. Instead of storing all of the metadata and conversion data as external xmp files, it's all stored in the DNG. Oh yeah, the Bridge is way better than the browser. Just as an experiment, I converted a few directories of raw files with ACR set on full auto. Most of them are good. I'm also learning a lot about raw conversion by watching the auto conversion work and seeing if I can make it better. There are links to some pretty good articles on photoshopnews.com Enough for now. See you later, gs
