Good Question: Why Are Stacks Are Only in Photoshop CS3 Extended?

Yesterday, commenter Chris Norris wrote:

I was totally okay with the extra Extended version until I read about image stacks and what that will mean for photographers. The line we keep hearing from Adobe is, "CS3 will be great for photographers, Extended is for people doing 3d and super fancy stuff that photographers don't care about." That seemed okay until I read this about stacks…. To me, that indicates that they're just going for the money with the CS3 Extended. Yeah, CS3 is great, but... if you're REALLY SERIOUS about this stuff, you should have Extended, right?

Adobe's John Nack speaks to that question on his blog today:

Now, I'll admit that seeing image stacks this way makes our marketing story a little more challenging.  Didn't we say that "Photoshop Extended" is meant to offer specific capabilities to people who need them, and that we haven't withheld core photographic functionality in order to get every customer wanting/using Extended? We did say that, and it's true.  Image stacks are powerful and (I think) pretty cool, but I'd feel uneasy about overselling them a core photographic tool.  There's both power and potential here, but it's a little more science-fair-ish than we'd like to sell for mainstream photography work.

I'd say there are plenty of arguably "science-fair-ish" features of regular Photoshop that could be characterized as going way beyond mainstream "core photographic tools." HDR anyone? On the other hand, given the number of smart, creative people who use Photoshop, it's not surprising that someone quickly came up with an artistic use for a tool that was engineered for science. What do you think?

Comments

[Ashok Sharma]

image stacking is a very useful feature for photographers in general,but keeping this feature in the extended CS3only ,Adobe has displayed a stingy attitude being aware of their monopoly.Additional features of extended CS3 are going to be hardly useful for photographers.I wish there was a competition since 90% of photoshop is any way useless for photographers.If they have really photographers in mind ,they should come up with a highly pruned photoshop removing all the garbage which a professional photographer never uses.

[Tom Husband]

Lightroom has Stacks and it's for photographers. Why not CS3 Standard?

Also, isn't Measuring Tool, Vanishing Point and some HDR features missing from CS3 Standard too?

[s2art]

I agree wholeheartedly that PSP is bloat-ware, for photographers, I also dream of the day of TOTAL non-destructive pixel editing, the end of the rounding error and true 16 bit editing, and not having to load ALL pixels into ram, plus the ability to output to sizes and resolutions all from one file...

Oh wait that software exists... just. I'm glad I bought Live Picture before it was crushed by Adobe's business model [allegedly] and have a dedicated box for it, 1 meter wide by 10 meter prints @ 180 dpi, anyone?

[Chris Norris]

Tom, the Lightroom stacks are completely different than the Photoshop stacks. With LR stacks, you're just logically grouping a few photos into one unit. With the Photoshop stacks, each image is a part of a smart object, and you can combine them in mathematical ways that you can't in Lightroom.

For what it's worth, I ended up getting a copy of CS3 Extended via work, so I did get the stacks. They're fun, but I can see that they're probably not going to be useful to most photographers.