Upgrading Photoshop - is it worth it?

[Diamond]

I use PS CS2 for my maps, and I've been very, very happy with it. I'm considering, though, upgrading to the newest phase of PS sometime within the next year or so; just would need to set aside some of the money each month I normally spend on books.

However... is it worth it? Does the newest edition of PS and/or CS really offer enough benefits and improvements to make it worth while?

[Clercon]

Well it depends on how you look at it. I'm probably upgrading this autumn, I'm going to attend a university course so I get it for student prize. The best thing you can do is to download the new version from Adobes homepage and try it out (I diid). It's free and works for 30 days, after that you have to buy it...or reinstall your computer and try it again. The most interesting thing in CS5 when it coms to maping is the new brushes that simulates watercolours. You can do some really nice things with it. So my advice is to try it before you decide.

[tilt]

I agree with Clercon, download it and try it - you don't have to uninstall CS2 first, you can use both... but in my opinion, no - not if you only use it for mapping. If however you play with photomanipulation, digital art and who knows what - then probably ... I'm going to buy it ... someday... when I get rich *lol*

[Diamond]

Unfortunately I can't try out the free trial because it'll make me uninstall CS2 first, which, for reasons I won't get into here is a pain in the butt to re-install.

I do plan to get into more photo-manipulation and stuff like that, and from what I've seen of the features on CS5, it looks as though it might be worth it. I just wondered if anyone who's used both had any comments.

Well, at the very least, even if I don't get it, I'll still be saving money every month for it, which is never a bad thing (saving up money, that is).

[Ascension]

I still use plain old CS and was thinking about getting CS4 at one point. CS5 doesn't seem to fit my needs any more than what I already have so maybe I'll wait for 6 to come out next year and hope it offers more for artists.

[Steel General]

Unless your big-time into photo-editing and such, CS5 isn't worth the cost. A co-worker does wedding photos on the side ans he said it's great for that but not much else has changed.

I have a copy of CS3 and it does everything I need.

[jwbjerk]

Unfortunately I can't try out the free trial because it'll make me uninstall CS2 first

Are you sure about that? I've had demos and older version installed at the same time. Currently i have the full version of CS1 and CS4 installed (can't get a scanner to work on CS4). This is on a Mac. Possibly it's different on Windows.

[JoeyD473]

I have Phostoshop 7, CS2 and CS3 on my XP machine, and they all work properly as far as I can tell

[RobA]

Two of the nice new features from CS5 I've been drooling over are content aware fill and puppet deformations.

Though I can get pretty close to content aware fill with gimp+resynthesizer and liquid rescale plugins.

-Rob A>

[tilt]

content aware fill is damn cool... at least in the tutorials *lol*