cs5's content aware.

I've checked out a few 'content aware' edits other people have been posting up. Honestly, im not very impressed at all, it looks like a glorified clone/heal brush. Anybody here with experience with it? Is there any usefulness of it, or is it just the lazy quick clone/heal tool?

Me being one of those posters, I will say that it is certainly a glorified clone/heal brush/function, and it certainly has it's limitations, but for the kinds of areas it does well...it does pretty damn well considering the time it would take to otherwise clone the "old" way. In more complex settings it's probably going to make things worse though.

I'm also not super duper impressed with the CA examples I've seen here, but I am also not disappointed. The demo Adobe gave was very impressive, but I know that presenters often try many different experiments before selecting the one to show... The truth is usually a notch below.

Anyway, since I'm still using CS2 and am therefore 3 versions behind, maybe it's still worth the $199 to upgrade.

I am finding the improve Refine Edge to be extremely helpful. Another feature that will only appeal to some, but is still cool is the puppet warp. Essentially, if you have an element that you can isolate in it's own layer (best way), you then stick it with pins for the points you don't want to move, then move your object...like a puppet. This isn't free transform, it's more of a few steps above the liquify filter.