CS4 worth the upgrade from CS3?

stsva wrote in post #7899835
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.

That's good advice. I tried the trial as well and had performance issues, as have many others. Updating my video drivers helped some, but it was still much slower. I'm sticking with CS3.

I've upgraded each time from CS to CS3, but only because the upgrade gave me the specific additional capabilities that broke some bottleneck in my workflow, like enabling Liquify to handle 16-bit files. That little update in CS3 allows me to make Liquify changes right up front where they should be, rather than at the tail end of editing.

But I haven't seen anything yet in CS4 that would be worth upgrading. At this point, the learning curve of the GUI would just slow me down for a while without giving me any new capabilities at the back end of it.

I'm not going to a 64-bit system before CS5 (I depend on too many applications that are still 32-bit), so no reason to upgrade for that.

The big Bridge upgrade happened in CS3, and while I'd be interested in an improvement...I'm not that interested. There are some new video improvements, too, but it sounds like I'd need to update all three of the video cards I'm using now...so I can live with what I've got now until CS5 and a 64-bit system.

Thanks husband of the avatar=wife and RDKirk, much appreciated.

One thing, if you own a new camera, the RAW files may not be supported by CS3. I can't open up my Panasonic G1 RAW files in CS3 and I think the same was true when I owned a LX3. I have to import them into Lightroom II and then go into CS3.

I'm not a Photoshop guru so I don't plan on upgrading to CS4. I'm spending the $200 upgrade on books instead.

Well currently cs3 supports all my cameras, so am good on that.

And otherwise you can always go the DNG route

On the UI changes: The link at the end of this page pretty much circumvents them.

René Damkot wrote in post #7905131
And otherwise you can always go the DNG route

...

But that's a photoshop format and not interchangeable with proprietary camera raw formats.

You still have to get the raw data from the camera in some form unless you are will to work strictly from JPG camera images.

What I meant was convert a CR2 to DNG. That way you can for instance open 50D raw files in PSCS2.
True that the DNG file cannot be opened in DPP if that's what you meant.

Rene, right. I guess all I was really getting at was using Photoshop to open the new raw format directly as opposed to going through a two step process of some type.

I know each new camera sometimes "extends" the manufacturer raw file format and sometimes the new format is only handled but subsequent releases.

Thanks!

I went from CS2 to CS4 and love it so far. I think I should have tried to find a cheaper copy of CS3 however and been as happy.
Eh, Adobe was having a sale and I Googled a coupon code so the upgrade wasn't as much $$$ as it could have been thankfully.