I'm using Photoshop CS4, how much better is CS6?

Any opinions on CS4 vs CS6?

Eh, depends how you use photoshop. The contents aware healing brush and patch tools are the things I find most useful.

It is not going to be a revolutionary difference.

Yeah, it's evolutionary not revolutionary. As above, the content aware tools are nice and can save quite a bit of time with cloning / healing. The other new tools are less exciting and may or not make much of a difference to you.

CS7 is supposed to be getting an "anti camera shake" tool, which can calculate the formation of the blur streaks and wind it back. It won't be as good as keeping the camera steady I don't think, and heavy blurring will likely result in IQ loss as it reforms the picture. However, for the sports / action photographer it may come in useful if a slow shutter speed, panned shot has just not quite been spot on, as it could improve a slight loss of sharpness on the subject.

I await trying it out when CS7 is launched. If that sound useful to you, maybe wait until CS7?

If you do a lot of cloning and healing in your workflow though, CS6 is possibly worth the upgrade for content aware alone.

Its not imperative that you upgrade. There are time saving features for photographers, but performance and basic tools are similar between the both. It also depends on where you do most of your editing, as camera raw is nearly identical between the two.

Here are a few features (that relate to photo) so far I find useful:
The new crop tool is alright. Adaptive wide angle filter - helps to fix abberations. Content aware patch tool is better than the standard content replacement, since you can choose what the area will be replace with. And of course Field blur, Iris blur, and Tilt-Shift Blur effects are cool.
Look those up for more details.

But all in all, you can do everything in CS4, it just will take a little longer.

A few others I use all the time are content aware fill and puppet warp.

Oh yeah, content aware was added in CS5, not CS4.

Dmitriy wrote in post #15866617
Oh yeah, content aware was added in CS5, not CS4.

Content healing bursh was added in cs5 but the patch tool was added in cs6 I believe.

Content aware fill and spot healing brush tool with content aware option were added in CS5. Content aware patch tool - CS6. I thought content aware was in CS4.

Content aware fill and scale were new in CS5. There are some new filters in CS6, like the tilt shift tools and such. But those are things you can replicate other ways.

CS6 is a little more buggy than CS5 was. More so on the Mac than Windows. I skipped form CS2 to CS5 so I can't say how it compares to CS4.

I went from CS3>CS5>CS6 so didn't use CS4. The best change, IMO, was ACR7.x, major improvement. A few of the Content Aware tools are useful.

As a side note, Adobe changed their upgrade policy and you can only get the upgrade pricing if you have CS5. As CS7 is probably not too far off I would assume only those with CS6 would be eligible for upgrade pricing.

ACR is leagues better.

Apart from that the biggest change is user interface and workflow. IMO PSCS6 is a vast improvement. YMMV.

https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1205283
https://photography-on-the.net …=1257972&highli​ght=PS+CS6

On OSX, upgrading from PSCS5 to PSCS6 should be a no-brainer, if only for the fact that you can use more then 2GB of RAM in CS6 (32bit)
Side note: I find PSCS6 to be a bit less unstable then PSCS4 and PSCS5 on my Mac. About equally buggy though

As Dennis said: You're too late to upgrade from PSCS4 to PSCS6, so you'll have to pay for a full version or subscribe…
I think in that case, I'd subscribe. PSCS7 probably won't be too far away (LR5 Beta is already here).

I upgraded from CS4 to CS6 and the ACR improvements (such as tonal adjustments, targeted adjustment tool, and noise reduction) alone were worth the $120.

Good to know. Thanks.

I went from CS4 to CS6 and find it to have been worthwhile. Content aware fill is nice and puppet warp can be quite useful. I also like that the crop tool works the same as it does in Lr, as I always preferred the Lr version of the tool.