Photoshop CS vs CS3 resize. Ouch.
Normally I wouldn’t exactly make it a point to discuss the intricacies of Photoshoppery. But since I’ve been using it since version 2.5 and feel fairly well versed in all its nooks and crannies, you can imagine my disappointment upon finding out that the CS3 beta — which I was indescribably stoked to download since it finally added Intel Mac support, and I do most of my day to day work on a MacBook Pro — can’t handle image resampling for crap. I thought I saw this on an image I was editing the other day, but it wasn’t totally clear until I was working on a particularly angular high res shot of a Dell monitor that I needed to downsize. The results are almost identical on bicubic, bicubic sharper, and bicubic smoother — they all suck. I hope this is something they fix before it goes official, but I can’t imagine why they’d be messing with those algos anyway. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
P.S. -This has been confirmed by two other people; for reference, the image used is here, shrunken to 440px wide.
I'm an editor and technology critic in the midst of founding a new web startup: 
ok so ryan gave me the same original file to repeat the test. i tried and tried. i tried all the settings. i tried doing a save as and opening the result in preview in case cs3 was just displaying it funny. i tried different sizes. they all sucked. if other people aren’t having this problem, the only thing i can think of is that both ryan and i are running trial copies. could that be the problem?
Don’t quote me on this, but I thought I heard somewhere that they’ve switched to using OpenGL for some of their image rendreing like this, but that support for this wasn’t rolled out with the beta. Sorry I don’t have links for more info.
I’ve found the problem: it looks like CS3 doesn’t like it when you do radical image resizing. That image is about 4000×4000 pixels, so I tried resizing it down to 2000×2000, then to 1000×1000, then to 500×500, and finally to 440×440. The resulting image doesnt suffer from the aliasing that yours does.
Looks like Adobe’s still gotta iron some bugs out – I’ll figure out how I can submit this info.
Here’s a link to the resultant picture.
http://static.flickr.com/137/326076245_743cb8ffcd_o.jpg
Looks like it’s a known issue after all:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=72&catid=626&threadid=1223864&enterthread=y
I’m having the same experience, googled and found this page. I’ve done a side-by-side comparison on a number of pics and all of the CS3 interpolation modes seem to be really messed up.
Looks like we’re all having these problems.
I’m downsampling images from my 5D and the resultant image using ANY of the interploations in CS3-B are horrible, I’m actually doing my work in CS3-B and then exporting to CS2 to resize and finish off the piece of work.
Shockingly on their official forums, Adobe state they won’t address it until the final product – so in effect this Beta is useless to test a production environment for any professional photographer that requires downsizing for the web (where most of my clients view their images).
I have the same problem. So I use the older version to resize images. It’s a bug for sure. It’s so obvious!
Any news on this subject? was the issue resolved? I am looking to buy CS3 and googled and found this.
thanks
It’s fine now from what I can tell.