We get a rare glimpse under the hood of Photoshop CS2 with MacWorld's mini-interview of Adobe's Photoshop CS2 and Bridge product manager John Nack. Nack — who is known as a smart, straight-shooter — offers insights into the considerations that drove some of the changes to Photoshop CS2. He confirms that Adobe took a hard look at the market for Photoshop and realized that Photoshop is not only used by creative professionals at work. There are plenty of digital photography enthusiasts and other home users who want the best digital imaging program available. So Adobe made an effort to make Photoshop CS2 "affordable and approachable" and to keep changes to the program as "simple and transparent" as possible.

It's fascinating to read how Adobe came up with the idea of customizable menus that we now have in Photoshop CS2. Nack says he sat down and counted up the number of menu items in the last version of Photoshop (CS), finding a whopping 494 items. So Adobe came up with a plan to simplify and customize the menu system. Brilliant!

Nack talks about the replacement of the Photoshop-only File Browser with Adobe Bridge, which serves as a browser across Creative Suite programs. This was a hard pill for some Photoshop users to swallow at first, but Adobe tried to minimize the pain by putting many of the same navigation components and keystrokes into Bridge that had been in the File Browser.

Nack’s insights confirm my own experience that Adobe is a thinking company. It does not just pile on new Photoshop features with each revision for the sake of marketing hype. Each change is well-considered and thoroughly tested by a dedicated team of employees and outside experts.  Adobe’s thoughtful, customer-oriented approach plays a big role in keeping Photoshop in first place among image editing programs.

Thanks to MacWorld’s Jim Dalrymple for giving us this glimpse behind the scenes. And thanks to John Nack and the rest of Adobe’s Photoshop team for hitting another one out of the ballpark with Photoshop CS2 and Bridge.