CS4 worth the upgrade from CS3?

I've got CS3 and have heard of a number of "issues" with CS4 and don't really see that much in the release to get excited about. So the question is if you upgraded are you seeing that it was worth it? Would you do it again?

Thanks!

I mainly updated to get the improved Bridge CS4, not Photoshop CS4. PS CS4 offers me no value over CS3. I still the rest of the Design Standard CS3 Suite.

I have recently upgraded from CS2 and I feel it has been well worthwhile. When I was checking things the concensus seemed to have been that upgrading from CS3 was probably not worthwhile. Bridge is much better too.

Thanks Chas and Condyk. I appreciate the input. I use it primarily for straightforward photo processing (which is why I'm asking here in a photo group) nothing too fancy.

Oh and I don't use the bridge software.

I like UI more and a few things here and there. I would look at what Adobe specifically updated/added to make it worth the money. I like CS4 a lot more than CS3, but YMMV.

Thanks Christian.

i'm staying with CS3 for now...i use lightroom too but photoshop is my 'after raw' processing tool so i use both equally. i also use illustrator and indesign, and dreamweaver - but they all do just what i need them to already so no need to upgrade yet

maybe cs5...

i never use bridge

If you don't use bridge then don't bother upgrading. All CS4 does it slow things down and spoil the UI.

Seems like a love/hate with the new UI...

kenyc wrote in post #7894641
Seems like a love/hate with the new UI...

It is vastly different. I used CS3 a little bit before getting CS4, so I've learned most of PS on CS4. It's one of those things that people get used to a certain UI and another comes along and those people hate it. However, I find it faster to use than CS3. There are a lot of minor changes, but as most people will say, the UI is the biggest change. If I couldn't get a student discount, I never would have boughten CS4 as it wasn't a necessity, but rather a luxury of being a student. However, I will use more Adobe products now than I thought I was going to use when I purchased the master collection (which I doubt few, if any, people buy it unless they can get a bad student discount).

On the interface I wasn't attached the the old one so haven't worried about the new one. Seems to me not that different, or maybe it's just at my level of usage it seems pretty much the same. Most of us use lots of different software every day so a few changes in one app. isn't really a big deal IMO. It's transitional. I also find it quicker ... maybe because I use x64. I dunno!

I feel CS4 is *very* worthwhile for the 64-bit support, but for someone who doesn't run 64-bit then I can imagine it's not very worthwhile.

As one who shoots a lot of HDR, I do love CS4's Auto-Align feature, but that can be done by hand in a pinch so it's not worthwhile on it's own.

Over the years, I've found that every other PS is worth the upgrade, but upgrading for every release is not very worthwhile.

Thanks Christian, Condyk, and Scottes. It's looking like I may just stick with CS3 for a bit longer.

kenyc-
Try the trial download and see what you think. I tried it and, although I didn't mind the UI, I did have a fair amount of performance problems on my old PC (one of the original Athlon 64s with 2GB RAM). I bought CS3 instead and that works great.

Yeah, that's an idea stsva, but I didn't want to take the chance screwing up my current install of cs3. I'm got a pretty speedy machine bought last year primarily to do audio and graphics work so don't think I'd have performance issues. I'm more interested in whether it has improvements that are helpful in photography image processing and so far it sounds like the answer is not really....

Thanks!