Wow. Adobe has done the unthinkable and released a beta for the next release of Photoshop. If you’ve got a CS2 license I’d highly recommend going over to the Adobe Labs and signing up for an account and downloading the beta. You’ll have to enter your CS2 serial number on the site to enable the beta to work past two days, but it’s worth it.

I’m hardly a Photoshop guru, but I’ve never let that stop me from commenting on this stuff before… The new palette docks are a nice improvement in the interface, or at least they would be if I could figure out how to move them over to my second monitor. The real killer feature for photographers (at least that I’ve seen) is the smart objects/smart filters stuff though. Coupled with adjustment layers this means that most photographic manipulations can be done non-destructively, i.e. you can go back and make changes to the filters even after you’ve applied them, which is pretty cool. Bridge has seen some nice improvements too; it’s actually a program I can see using to manage my photos now.

Any rate, go download it and check it out. Even if you’re not a CS2 user it’s probably worth playing around with for the couple of days before it expires.