Adobe gave Photoshop CS 2 the motto: “The Power to Create the Extraordinary”. With its new features, Photoshop CS 2 certainly enables you to change photographs beyond recognition, further supporting the blurring boundary between what is there and what has been added later…

The most spectacular new feature in Photoshop is the vanishing point, to be found on the Filter menu. Every single photograph has at least one vanishing point which either Photoshop can detect automatically, or you can set up yourself. Vanishing point allow you to do all kinds of magic things.

For example, a window on one side of a house can be copied to another wall of that house, so that you end up with two windows. Photoshop automatically adapts the selection marquee to the perspective that must be applied, and will also apply the correct perspective to the copy as you move it from one wall to another.

Not only can you copy or move object in a correct way with regards to perspective, you can also clone objects with respect to perspective and change the objects so that they also comply with the lighting situation in effect in each area of the image.

It even becomes possible to apply a texture or a logo to an object with perspective applied correctly. In the same league, you will find a new transformation tool called Image Warp. This tool will bend and twist an object like it already did with text (Arch, bulge...) in Illustrator. It makes the process of applying art to a rounded object much easier, although it still requires fine-tuning to achieve perfect results.

The new Spot Healing Brush also belongs in the realm of time saving features. Just select a brush size, place the brush over the area you want to “correct” and click. The Spot Healing Brush thus allows you to get rid of complete elements in a composition.

Optical Lens Correction is a tool that is destined to change the way we look at photographing. In the past, when you shot architecture, you made sure you did your best not to take a picture too close up, because if you did, straight vertical lines would seem to converge.

There was no obvious way to correct for this flaw, which is essentially due to the way a normal lens works. Photoshop CS2’s Optical Lens Correction tool enables you to correct a photo with such distortions. It’s a very simple process too: just put a grid over the photograph and drag the sliders. There are about 8 parameters you can correct this way.

Red Eye removal is one of the lesser gods in Photoshop CS 2. It’s no big deal; even iPhoto has had it long before Photoshop. It works the same too: just click in the neighbourhood of the red eye and it turns black ---no pun intended.

More to the point is Photoshop’s support for HDR images. HDR or High Dynamic Range is the next step in digital photo retouching. It’s 32-bit floating-point editing, and it enables to bring out all the deepest shadows and the lightest detail in a photograph. The only condition is that you have a number of digital shots, taken with different exposures. This allows the program to merge the photos and create the HDR image from the set.

A new filter is the Smart Sharpen filter. It’s supposed to be an edge above the Unsharp Mask filter, with better preservation of edge details and discrete advanced sharpening of shadows and highlights. I have always found there was only one way to become better sharpening and that involved using Equilibrium’s DeBabelizer’s sharpening tool. This tool had about 3 dozen “frequencies” to sharpen an image, and it was (and is) so complicated that it takes half a day to fine-tune an image with good results.