Photoshop CS(8.0)

Photoshop CS (8.0) is likely the best version upgrade in its history. There are many new tools and features but the ones I'm most happy with are those for the photographers. There is a new panorama stitch tool, a shadow/highlight tool to fix some exposure errors, a range of photographic filters you can apply, metadata tools(!), the RAW import filter, a web gallery export script that does a reasonable job, built-in automation scripts, a new colour replacement tool and likely a few I've not noticed yet. There is so much new stuff that I may just break down and take a look at the books and tutorials when they are published sometime in Janaury. It's well worth the upgrade price for PS8.

I have one minor complaint which is that ImageReady seems to desaturate the hell out of jpegs when saving them for the web and it also strips off the metadata. I've stopped using ImageReady for photos since saving them as regular jpegs preserves the metadata and doesn't desaturate them while still keeping most of the images under 100k. I don't know if this is a bug or a feature but when I compare the same photo saved with ImageReady in PS7 with one saved in PS8 the difference is very noticeable.