EDITOR'S NOTE: Publish.com's Edmund Ronald will be offering a series of close-up looks at different aspects of the forthcoming Photoshop CS2, which Adobe Systems Inc. is shipping next month as part of its new Creative Suite 2. This initial installment focuses on Adobe Camera Raw 3.

In effect, the Creative Suite is a total environment for many of its users. CS2 is a city, even a metropolis.

Rather than attempt a judgmental review, I choose to describe the features of CS2 in the form of a travelogue.

A general overview of newly inaugurated construction in the Photoshop neighborhood is provided by city hall at Adobe.com.

However, some readers may choose to stay with me, day by day, for my arty tour with French subtitles.

Thanks for staying with this bus. The main point of entry to Photoshop CS is now the Adobe Bridge, which is a much-upgraded browser that has morphed into a standalone app.

It still looks the same, but has undergone extensive development. Several Bridge windows can now be opened at will.

New features include a slider for interactive resizing of thumbnails (wonderful) , and viewing folder contents as slideshows.

The renovated Adobe Bridge is a fast and functional image previewer that unifies the Adobe CS2 toolset.

The Bridge serves as the designated command center for selecting Photoshop files. We'll see that when multiple files are selected, the settings can be tweaked for the whole group. Then they can be batch-processed in the background.

We shall come back to examine the Bridge on a later leg of this tour. Just now, after selecting a handful of images, we shall ride over the Bridge to today's final destination, to grid square ACR3, wherein live the fierce and proud "Catchers in the Raw."

Raw format can be a lifesaver. Click here to read Edmund Ronald's column.

The Raw format is proving increasingly popular for digital capture, especially in a studio environment.

Sports photographers use high-speed cameras like the Canon 1DII or the Nikon D2Hs, set to shoot JPEG files in machine-gun mode.

However, fashion, portrait and product shots, and dare I say after that awful pun, glamour photography, are all intended for careful retouching.

Using digital, such shots will nowadays be captured in a Raw file by a slower high-resolution camera like the Canon 1DsII, or a digital back.

As I discussed in a recent column, the Raw capture creates a file with great exposure latitude that locks in the raw material for extensive post-exposure intervention.

Adobe provides a revised Camera Raw 3 tool to perform aesthetic adjustments, such as shadow or highlight retrieval and white point adjustment, on the raw data generated by just about all pro and prosumer cameras.

We're there; you may now get off the bus, but please don't scatter!

We can preview all the selected RAW images together in Adobe Camera Raw 3.0: A column of thumbnails will appear in a window to the left of the old ACR windows, as if ACR3 itself were a little browser.

Image adjustments can now affect one image at a time, or a whole group. Just select the ones you want tweaked before you move the sliders.

And there's more: A powerful settings-unifying button marked "synchronize" watches over the pane displaying the thumbnails that are getting tweaked.

As you see, ACR3 is greatly improved for processing and homogenizing groups of raw shots, something that was a bit painful with ACR2.

There's also some news in the settings themselves: Although the original ACR2 sliders are still there, Photoshop will compute what it believes to be optimal positions for the sliders on opening the plug-in.

These positions are locked in by little checkboxes that act like safeties.

Before moving a slider—say, exposure—you need to uncheck the "Auto" box next to it.

I find this a bit painful, like too many safeties on a camera.

However, there is a hidden logic to this somewhat excessive use of failsafes: If you've drifted from the optimal settings, you can get back to the auto-pilot's vision of sanity quickly, just by clicking in the box: The slider jumps back to the recommended setting.

Photoshop CS2 advances the state of photo manipulation Click here to read more.

There's also a curves dialog built into ACR3 which works just like the one in Photoshop, except it makes the adjustments on the RAW file. It comes with a crop tool.

There's a straightening tool that works with the crop tool.

All these tools apply non-destructive tweaks: They just indicate how the Raw file should be interpreted when it is converted into something else, like TIFF or JPEG, and imported into Photoshop.

The adjustments are stored in sidecar files; they're not written into the original Raw file.

Ah, yes, speaking of writing files: By selecting several files in ACR3, we can convert them and write them out simultaneously.

In fact, a background process takes over and does the conversions while we continue working.

This is yet another impressive usability improvement over the preceding version. Adobe has certainly done some fancy new construction work in the RAW neighborhood.

Hope you enjoyed this leg of your tour of Photoshop CS2. We'll take the bus back to your hotel now.

Edmund Ronald has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, but he is currently on a sabbatical as a photographer in Paris.