Wed Jul 28, 2010 4:22 am
Ive used Photoshop for many years. I have upgraded every version since 2. I upgraded just because I like to stay up to date.
I'd say yes, it is worth the upgrade. If for no other reason than to be able to use the new Camera RAW 6 engine. It's a very good improvement. CameraRAW 6 won't work with CS4.
That being said, I don't use Photoshop CS5 very much anymore, even though I have been a Photoshop/Bridge user forever. For 99% of my photo work I use Photoshop Lightroom 3. It uses the CameraRaw 6 system. I find that while CS5 is much more powerful or does more, Lightroom is quite enough. And Lightroom has some big advantages in the workflow area. It allows you to tweak NEF files without saving a PSD, TIFF or JPG copy of each file, so you use less disk space. And since it does non destructive tweaks (because the edits are stored in XMP sidecar files) and never actually alters a NEF file, you can always go back later and start from scratch. Does that make sense? With CS5 anytime you open a file, any changes you make have to be saved as a separate file. So you at least double how much disk space a photo uses, and often (if saving in PSD or TIFF) use up many times as much space per file. LR doesn't do layers and there are some things that are quite useful in CS5, so some people may still use CS5 a lot, but I feel most people would do fine with just a LR workflow. You may want to look into spending money on it rather than an upgrade for Photoshop? Or perhaps consider the best of all worlds, upgrade to CS5 AND Lightroom 3?