Anybody here using Adobe Photoshop CS3 yet?

If so, what are the benefits over CS2 that you like for digi-photogs?

Just bought it after a conference of commercial photography in Boston. The speaker was using it and the main advantage seems to be ACR4, where you can do many of the adjustments that used to be done in Photoshop BEFORE you commit the RAW file. In fact, in a lot of cases you can archive your changes in DNG format.

Soon to come (second hand via Russel Brown) is the ability to store several renderings at the same time in the same DNG file. So you can have several versions, and only one file stored (the differences are in the instruction set for opening the file).

Having several renders in one file will still be quite large, exporting multiple files with the correct pre-adjustments from a digital darkroom and then using an old version of Photoshop or even Elements can give excellent results and not affect the original files. Depends how much storage space you have to work with on your computer.

Also depends what exactly you want to do, I can't see much of a reason to upgrade. However, buying from new I'd probably go for CS3 as the price difference isn't that large.

That's not the only advantage of ACR4, but the whole idea being developed is that if you can make adjustments in ACR, you store only one file. The renderings are actually a small part of the file in ASCII text that hold the instructions for rendering the file.

The point of DNG (or any RAW format for that matter) is that the original data from the camera is never altered at all, but only an instruction set that is applied to the file. If they can store multiple instruction sets in one file, then you only have to have one file! Not ready for prime time yet, but it is being developed.

Of course, this was a conference of people who could keep only one copy of each file and use something like iView Pro to actually be their database of images. The images themselves are not stored in any particular order, but their locations are carefully listed in the database software.

True, but with the huge pricing scandal that is Adobe I think it is best to stick to what you have at the moment. If you need to buy from new then there is not much point in going for an older version. If upgrading what a while and see if anyone sues Adobe first.