Hands-On Report--Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta (Universal), How Fast Is It?

2004–09December 18, 2006Bill FoxReviews
We own a copy of Adobe Creative Studio CS2 so we downloaded and installed the beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3. We extensively use Adobe GoLive CS2 so we were anxious to get an idea of how fast Adobe's new creative software will be when released in Intel-native form as Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3). The CS2 serial number is needed to get a CS3 beta serial number good until the final product ships in the spring of 2007. A CS2 serial number is not needed to try out the CS3 beta for up to two days.

We timed 15 actions in both Photoshop CS2 (9.0.2) and CS3 (beta) using the action set (PS Bench) available for benchmarking since Photoshop 6 and the built-in timing feature of Photoshop. We also recorded the launch times of both versions. Our 15" 2.33GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo was the test computer.

Here are the launch time results:

Launch Times in Seconds*
Photoshop
Improvement
CS2
CS3
%
.
First Launch
44
21
52
Additional Launches
14
4
71
*Average of 3 runs.

Here are the results from applying the 15 actions:

Action Times in Seconds*
Photoshop
Improvement
Action/Filter
CS2
CS3
%
.
90o Rotation
.3
.1
85p Gaussian Blur
.8
.2
10p Unsharp Mask
.6
.2
Despeckle
.1
.2
RGB to CMYK
1.0
.3
60% Reduction
.3
.1
Lens Flare
.6
.5
Halftone
.6
1.1
NTSC Colors
.7
.4
Accented Edge
2.1
1.2
Pointillize
2.1
1.2
Watercolor
5.5
2.6
Polar Coordinates
.4
.5
Radial Blur
2.1
1.6
Lighting Effect
.7
.5
.
TOTAL
17.9
10.7
40
.
*Average of 3 runs.

The Photoshop CS3 beta is substantially faster running natively on our Intel-based MacBook Pro than Photoshop CS2 (9.0.2) running under Rosetta emulation. The first launch of the application is 52 percent faster and subsequent launches are 71 percent faster. Our results compare favorably with the 60 percent improvement claimed by Adobe.

Overall, the 15 filter actions were 40 percent faster in Photoshop CS3 than CS2. This is exactly the same improvement claimed by Adobe for 250 actions. But, curiously, not all of actions applying various filters tested faster in CS3--three were slower (Despeckle, Halftone and Polar Coordinates).

In summary, we have independently confirmed the speed improvement claims by Adobe for the Photoshop CS3 beta (Universal) on our MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo. [Bill Fox]

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