I have Photoshop CS5 and tried out CS6. The only difference I found was the new darker interface look and some improved tools such as the content aware patch.
It really depends on if the new features are worth the $ on the upgrade. If you were using CS2 or CS3 I'd say upgrade. But from CS5 I don' think it's worth it.
Hugh Alison wrote: Is the upgrade worth the cost?
£186 in the UK - about $240!
I don't use or want Lightroom, but I would like to have ACR7.
Not a professional user.
Hugh,
Less than a year ago, I was a certified LR basher.
The program gets way too much attention for catalogs and keywords, which I have zero interest in.
Once I gave it some serious attention and a serious chance, I now cannot imagine my workflow without it.
I've had a copy of CS6 upgrade for a few months, but am holding off installing it until I've completed an SSD upgrade, but of the features I've seen documented in videos and workshops, it seems to have some significant enhancements.
.
Hugh Alison wrote: Is the upgrade worth the cost?
£186 in the UK - about $240!
I don't use or want Lightroom, but I would like to have ACR7.
Not a professional user.
I see a few things I like over my 5.5 Complete collection (Like saving in the background) but I'm not spending the $$ to upgrade. Of course I use Lightroom more than CS5.1. CS is for those finishing touches and with my D800 I no longer need much, even when printing very large.
Lulie Lens
Posts: 157
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I like the fact that it has a backup restore copy in case the program crashes. Also the saving in the background feature frees tones of time as some large files seem to take forever to finish. I also think "load lash mesh" liquify button that was added this time around is super handy. Those are the most notable changes for me, but if you're a light user with small files then all these things might be practically useless for you.
I said I wasn't going to upgrade from CS4 to CS5 and then I saw the Content Aware. I upgraded. Then I said I wasn't going to upgrade again until CS99. Then I saw the new CS6 content aware. I like toys. I have CS6 now. I haven't played with everything yet but I don't regret it.
From using the trial version for a brief while, I concluded that they'd revamped how some filters/plugins manage virtual memory. This (or other improvements) dramatically reduced some run times (by 50%).
(The Mondo framework for virtual memory creates MVM files. In CS5, it seems to use files even if there's plenty of RAM, and use the biggest drives/the drives with the most free space, even when there's a nice fast drive with plenty of space. The result is the slowest possible use of storage.)
pellepiano
Posts: 2,172
Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
Im staying at CS5 ( Im on Mac ). Did not find that much use for CS6 new things. Many plugins does not work with it eiether. What would have made me get it was if the new Lens Blur filters had been more advanced than the old one ( where you even can change the focus point in the filter ).
richy01 wrote: Depends on how often and for what type of work you use it. Download the trial and see if you think it's worth it...
+1 on This.
That depends on your needs. I know people who still use all the tools available in Photoshop 7 much the same way and I know people who are taking full advantage of the new features of CS6. In other words if you can tell me what you want/need of CS6 and what do you use the most in CS5 and what do you miss the most in CS5 I can give you a much better response.
I personally I'm using CS6 and I love all the big features, especially much improved Camera RAW 7, new dark interface is great but some other UI modifications I don't like so much. I got used to them but in my opinion they were more intuitive in CS5, less steps to do the same thing.
Nothing major but things like in CS5 there is an icon to split the screen and see two images side by side and than match the zoom and location. Very useful I used that a lot. In CS6 for some strange reason there is no icon so I have to go three time trough the menus to to do the same thing.
But there are great new small improvements all around PS as well, like layers panel that has a lot of improvements and some other small UI stuff. I guess you win some, lose some, depending of what you need and even more so on what you are used to and how quickly you adapt to new environment.
One thing to consider, Adobe stated that once 5.5/6 came out, users would have to update for every new release. No skipping. So if you plan on upgrading you need to get 6. However, you can let 5 run it's useful life to you and switch over to Elements and Lightroom in the future (much cheaper than upgrading for every release)
MacLeod Designs
Posts: 3,309
Mooresville, North Carolina, US
Fashion Fling Images wrote: I have Photoshop CS5 and tried out CS6. The only difference I found was the new darker interface look and some improved tools such as the content aware patch.
It really depends on if the new features are worth the $ on the upgrade. If you were using CS2 or CS3 I'd say upgrade. But from CS5 I don' think it's worth it.
Raw converter in CS6 is WAYYYY better... that right there was worth it to me
oh and auto save has completely saved me several times,
AKMac wrote: Is it possible to upgrade ACR to the latest version while still sticking with CS5?
Not sure, maybe in some manual way but regularly speaking no as far as I know. You can however convert the unsupported raw files into DNG that is read by the previous versions of ACR but for the functionality of the new ACR you still have to upgrade or use new Lightroom 4, since they share same processing engine.
I'm late to the CS6 party. Just upgraded from CS5 and I'm floored at how much better some of the basic tools are like magnetic lasso and the raw editor. Superior to previous versions and these simple enhancements have significantly improved my workflow and decreased my editing time.
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