Just wondering, I am about to purchase CS… should I stick with CS3, and buy at a discount or go for Version 4??
anyone got any idea what the benefits to 4 are? I know I should go and spend hours in google, but i figured I could get a quick run down from the people in the know…
Hard to make that determination since I don’t know what your needs are. I’ve found CS4 to be a good bit faster (I’m not counting the tests I’ve reported in another thread that have to do exclusively with 100GB+ scratch disk usage) but not a night and day difference.
The CS4 UI seems much more mature. CS2 to CS3 had some big changes. CS3 to CS4 changes seem less dramatic, but finally gets it right. Not saying they can’t make it better, but it seems like CS4’s UI is what they meant to do with CS3.
If you’re buying the whole suite, I’d definitely say CS4. Illustrator CS4 seems like a home run. However, I used Freehand for a decade before I started using and cursing at Illustrator four or five years ago. If you’ve always loved Illustrator it could be an unwelcome departure but to me it’s like Adobe finally got a clue, took some of the Freehand concepts and turned Illustrator (almost) into a best-of-both-worlds application.
Also, take what I say with a grain (or a big ol’ rock) of salt. I’ve only had about six hours with CS4 and so I’m talking from first impressions here.
Most, if not all, new versions of Photoshop CS3 for Windows available from Amazon.com come not directly from Amazon.com but from their 3rd party merchants, often sellers who "just registered", and are PIRATED copies that will fail to activate. Hence the low price.
I found these pirated editions readily available in the SF Bay Area too, also at ridiculously low prices.
Whether its worth it or not depends on what kind of work you are doing Derrick – if you are doing a lot of painting then its probably worth it for the rotatable view, and the brush resize slider. And you might find the new content aware rescale useful if you need to do A LOT of making images fit quickly within different formats, without worrying too much about image mush. Cloning also has an improvement
Other than that, in terms of TRULY NEW features, sure there are tweaks here and there, but no "how did I live without this before" practical move forward, similar to Liquify and healing technology. Thats my opinion
Most, if not all, new versions of Photoshop CS3 for Windows available from Amazon.com come not directly from Amazon.com but from their 3rd party merchants, often sellers who "just registered", and are PIRATED copies that will fail to activate. Hence the low price.
I found these pirated editions readily available in the SF Bay Area too, also at ridiculously low prices.
Trying to get a jump on redistributing the wealth are we?
If you’re into painting it’s well worth it. In addition to what Mark Reynolds notes (the brush resizing, the rotating view), the spring loaded keys are excellent. IMHO those three features are worth the price alone. Also the OpenGL response is great even on my lesser computer (A Macbook Pro duo core 2.4ghz).
If you’re a Painter fan you could probably justify the cost based on the need not to upgrade Painter.
In fairness to the other features, I haven’t really tried them. Just got the upgrade two days ago. A lot of the Bridge and Camera Raw stuff seems like stuff that’s already in Lightroom. I’ll be glad to be proven wrong.
As I have mentioned on other threads, if you printing (PS manages Color) through the printer drivers PSCS4 has exactly the same issue as LR2, where the driver is forced to use ColorSync and you will not be able to turn CM off. Where as PSCS3 forced CM off in the drivers.
Yes 10.5.5. Canon iPF9000 with 1.30 driver version for 10.5.
Luckily Canon provides a plugin for PS that works in PSCS4. Needs to be copied from the PSCS3 plugin folder to the PSCS4 plugin folder though as the plugin installer will not recognize PSCS4.
But, I really wonder how many other printer/driver combinations will have this same issue.
The other real issue is you can no long make a profile target from PSCS4 as even with "No CM" selected in PSCS4 the driver is still forced to ColorSync.
The ColorSync Utility work around that we had to use for LR1.3.1 and now LR2.1 would work but that limits you to the media type listed in the ColorSync Utility.
No-one in their right mind uses Apple CMM they use the Adobe ACE. (ColorSync as such is not listed as being part of CS4 CMM)
Tell that to Adobe. Since PSCS3 choosing "PS Manages Color" forced the driver to turn off CM and LR1.4.1 allowed you to choose. Then they go and change PSCS4 and LR2.1 to force the driver to use ColorSync.
