Adobe Photoshop CS3’s Two Flavors

According to Photoshop Senior Product Manager John Nack Photoshop, Photoshop CS3 will be released in two flavors, CS3 and CS3 Extended. Extended will create a new “franken-app” intended for video, animation, medical and science type-folks and is not to be mistaken for a “premium” edition. John describes this with great care, but I don’t know how Adobe can market this in a way that people will really ‘get’ what they are trying accomplish. This seems similar to the positioning After Effects Production Bundle versus standard AE, specialized features and tools for a select market. They’ve been quite thoughtful about how they name this “extended” set of features, but they may have been better served pushing it even further…with a more technical name or gone so far as to mimic AE and use the term ‘bundle’.

Regardless of the naming I’m quite curious to see what these new tools are and how they could improve my workflows, the more automation and in-app tools they develop the better off they will be. Integration is great, but if you can integrate or assimilate functionality in a way that keeps me, as a user, in a single app longer even better.