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Adobe has made many improvements to its venerable image editor, but some seem more incremental than dramatic.
Every couple of years or so the 800pound design gorilla known as Photoshop - or Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Photoshop CS Extended and all the other iterations and names given to the various Creative Suites - gives birth to another offspring and photographers have to decide once again whether it's worth it to pay for the new arrival.
The last version - Adobe CS3 - came out in 2007 and offered a host of significant improvements, particularly for any Mac user who had bought one of the then-new Intel-based Apple computers. Because CS3 was a so-called "universal binary" version, it ran significantly faster than the previous CS2 package. In a review of Photoshop CS3 in the July 2007 issue of PDN, I clocked the Intelfriendly version about 70 percent faster at launching Photoshop and 50 percent faster overall.
Though there were a host of other new tools and a better-organized, redesigned interface in CS3, 1 heartily recommended the upgrade to anyone who was using an Intel-based Mac, based on the increased performance alone.
The latest versions of Photoshop - Adobe Photoshop CS4 and CS4 Extended - don't have the same major selling points, and feel more like an incremental upgrade than the jump from CS2 to CS3. While there is still plenty to like about these newest versions including some great new time-saving tools and a better-organized overall structure to Photoshop, Bridge, and Adobe Camera RAW, if you're already a user of CS3, there's less urgency to make the jump to the new versions.
GETTING CREATIVE IN A RECESSION
Adobe is offering CS3 users a $200 upgrade price for CS4, which is the same cost for moving between the two previous versions; it is still a relatively good deal. (It would be nice if Adobe offered some kind of "recession-special" for photographers, and maybe lowered the upgrade price to $150. Wishful thinking perhaps.)
On their own, both Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended are not cheap, selling for $649 and $999, respectively. (These prices are in line with what Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended sold for at their introduction.)
Of course, Adobe would probably...