Who's Planning To Upgrade To Photoshop CS5?

[GB1]

I have CS2 Education Edition and I just read on Adobe's website what appears to say that this is upgradable via normal upgrade price, so yes, I may get the upgrade. Btw, the education version of CS5 is the same price as the upgrade.

[OldClicker]

I have CS2 Education Edition and I just read on Adobe's website what appears to say that this is upgradable via normal upgrade price, so yes, I may get the upgrade. Btw, the education version of CS5 is the same price as the upgrade.

Is there any difference between the Education and the standard versions for Adobe products? - TF

[mjs1973]

Is there any difference between the Education and the standard versions for Adobe products? - TF

Yes and no. From what I have read, the functionality of both versions in the same. The difference comes in the wording of the licensing agreement on the software. The way I understand it is that you are not allowed to use the educational version for commercial use. That's my overly simplified understanding anyway.

[GB1]

Is there any difference between the Education and the standard versions for Adobe products? - TF

Not that I could tell with CS2, though I'm not a PS expert. When I open my CS2 it simply displays Education Edition on the splash screen. I haven't noticed any disabling of features or any difference in the output.

I don't know the difference between Extended edition, but this is what their website says:

For educators or students,

Adobe Photoshop® CS5 Extended Student and Teacher Edition: US$199 vs US $999 normal price.

[flyinion]

Yeah the only differences are supposed to be you "can't use for commercial purposes". Hmm interesting to hear the upgrade cost might be the same as an education version. If they will let me buy a commercial upgrade and use it on my student version I might do that just to get all the documentation that might come with it. Student versions are the disk in a DVD case with the key and that's it.

I'm also debating doing the Master collection this time though instead of Web Design suite just to get Premiere to replace my aged Premiere Elements 4 for video work. I hardly ever use any of the other products in the suite besides PS though so maybe I should just grab a copy of PS by itself, upgrade to a new Premiere Elements and call it a day. It's just hard to pass up a suite for the extreme discount you get on a student edition.

EDIT: lol looks like I will not be upgrading from student CS3 Web Suite to the commercial one. CS4 gets the good upgrade price, CS3 is $800.

[flyinion]

Hmm actually I was just looking at the FAQ for the student/teach editions. It looks like they have changed their policy. You can't have it installed on a work machine (must be a private use computer) but you CAN use the software for commercial use. It also says you can upgrade a student edition to a commercial product.

Can I use my Adobe Student and Teacher Edition software for commercial use?
Yes. You may purchase a Student and Teacher Edition for personal as well as commercial use.

Can I upgrade my Adobe Student and Teacher Edition software?Adobe Student and Teacher Edition software can be upgraded to a commercial version when the user is no longer a student or teacher.

http://www.adobe.com/education/stude...ition/faq.html

[SmartWombat]

I paid enough for CS3 and only use about 1/10th of it, so if the new version doesn't edit my photos for me by magic there's no reason to upgrade.

[drg]

Loupey,

Those are the conversion options available for the DNG converter. That is a separate standalone program. That's what the first link is for not Adobe Camera RAW which has a link off that page too!

ACR is a plug-in and the newer versions indeed require updates to CSx. Kind of bummer I know. Adobe addressed this with the standalone converter last year.

The DNG converter has all kinds of compatibility options including whether for archive purposes to embed the original RAW file untouched in the DNG output. Creates a huge file in some cases! Specification for embedded JPEG preview by size is also available.

The newest cameras are supposed to be backward compatible with the conversion magic. I've run a lot of different RAW files back and forth between different version of PS, CS, and LR on both PC's and Macs in the past year and a half via DNG. I've had to tweak the conversion a time or two to but still was able to carry sidecar edits (which work as .PSD tags or via .PSD conversion) without incident. A couple of the NIKON tags/options have been strange but there's new fixes for them as well.

So use the 2.4 output option and CS2 is supposed to be able to read the resulting DNG file. It won't kill your original RAWs at all. I'd recommend specifying a separate directory at least until you find the right combo.

There are some models of camera that produce native DNG that don't convert to a backward compatibility. I don't have a full list but the one's I know about are in the dMF world and those are just crazy cameras anyway. I'd take one of course.

If your camera model doesn't convert to a backward compatibility with the DNG conversion option, you may be stuck.

Then the best cheapest option is to buy Lightroom. Then it will pass the files off to CSx. I've even used Lightroom to run RAW conversions out to a really old version of Photoshop Elements (2 or 3) on a notebook that hadn't been upgraded. Did that via a PSD file without any problem.

Let me know as I am trying to keep my own micro-database of issues with all things DNG and RAW.

Thanks and I hope you didn't take anything I said negatively:blush2:

[drg]

From what I am hearing LR is just a combination of Bridge and ACR. Those are what I use and I love the interface. Bridge works very well with my personal image file system, so what would be the advantage of switching to LR?

I think the big advantage of using LR is the cataloging function. It's a much better system for managing large catalogs of images and being able to find them later. If your system works for you then I don't see a big need for LR.

When I upgraded to CS4 I also purchased LR2. My workflow has always been to save the images I PP as layered PSD files. These are my keepers and in most cases, the most important images for me. When I installed LR2 and began importing all of my images, for some reason, it wasn't importing my PSD files. My thought at the time was, what good is a file management system if it doesn't pick up my most important images, and why would a program with Photoshop in the name not recognize my PSD files? As a result, I'm still using Bridge/ACR/Photoshop for all of my cataloging and PP work. It works for me now, but as my catalog of images grows, I may have to give LR another try.

That I am prejudiced toward Lightroom should be kept in mind as a disclaimer with what follows.

At various times I have written (blogs and articles) that initially with LR 1 it did not impress me a great deal. Was it a gizmo software offering or not? I had used the original beta and finally decided to see what I could really do with the product. It took a weekend and a couple thousand wedding photos from three different shoots to sell me on the concept. Even now I offer this piece of 'wisdom'; Lightroom is not intuitive at the start. There is a learning curve.

Where the various Photoshop CS and PSE offerings concentrate on a project of one image or set of images to be combined, HDR'd, Pano'd, clipped etc., Lightroom is about working with many images. Sure you may 'edit' one pic at a time, then you can apply all or portions of the same identical adjustments to any number of photos. With very little storage or memory penalty by comparison.

The ability to put the same image in different formats and into may collections or groups of photos while still only having the original taking up permanent disk space is unbelievably beneficial. This is the biggest strength for me of non-destructive editing. I can make fifty versions of the same image and look at one after another and then decide which one or ones I want to keep.

Bridge is built to pass an image(s) back and forth between various elements in the whole Creative Suite and not just PS and the RAW translator. It has functionality to do several things (and the lack of macro functions in LR hamper LR slightly) very well, but Bridge by comparison isn't as quick.

The tools in LR to sort and catalog are indeed at first the main use of Lightroom and the other stuff is, well redundant? Not so. While cataloging you can apply all kinds of treatments, levels of RAW processing etc to some or all the files without editing or Developing as it is called in LR. And it's easily reversed or copied without huge file storage space penalty. Can't do that in Bridge and PS. Not even close to what Lightroom provides. I've seen scripts that 'do the same thing in Bridge'; they are still running . . . be done soon . . . time for more beverage of choice . . . now its dinner time . . . oh, yeah need more disk space . . . The Lightroom equipped notebook is quietly sleeping as it finished hours ago.


There are lots of hidden things or techniques that don't jump out at you. That a user can grab parts of the photo and adjust them or change all or portions of the exposure via moving the histogram aren't obvious but do they work! The before and after comparison tools, the incremental adjustments views via the history (you'll find out how good your hardware really is with this after a while) multi monitor support built in (still in its infancy admittedly) and now Adobe is show the next version of LR with a browser oriented file interface. Its a powerful place to deal with an ever increasing number of pics!

The output tools are more capable than I would have initially credited them being. It took a lot digging through various documents and publications to understand what you should and shouldn't do with each of the ones I successfully use. Part of that learning curve thing!

Lightroom is worth exploring in the trial (fully functional of course) version to see it it will be of benefit. If nothing else it is a great front end for RAW conversion. And that's non-destructive so you can try many different conversion to see what works best.

It is a different concept but if you once discover that it works for you, being without is very inconvenient.

[Photo-John]

I paid enough for CS3 and only use about 1/10th of it, so if the new version doesn't edit my photos for me by magic there's no reason to upgrade.

Please see "Content Aware Fill..."

[megan]

Hm I just checked my Mac information, and I only seem to have a duo- not multi-processor. Guess that settles it! However, I have CS4, am quite happy with it, and while my work isn't hardcore journalism, I'm no stranger to press room coffee. I have no use for content aware. I'll stick with what I've got for now! When this Mac sadly dies, I'll upgrade all at the same time.

[Skyman]

Adobe has 3 licensing models, Regular (stupidly overpriced but what are you going to do)
Education, designed for academics and schools and other people teaching the software. Fully funtcional but you need to meet their purchasing criteria, although if you have a good relationship with your supplier they might still be able to get you the education version, but that defeats the purpose if you aren't really meant to have it.
The Student version is harder again to get. Adobe really only releases it through channels where they can verify your status like the university bookshop and even then you need to be a full time student. It is seriously cheap and the license does allow you to use it for commercial purposes. The other thing to look for is that a couple of months after the new version is released the price for the older versions will drop especially for students.

[Sebastian]

Adobe really soured their reputation with us here with the pile of garbage that is CS4. That being said, I'm sure we'll upgrade and see if we can use 5 in production.

As for "content-aware fill", that's a feature that'll put a lot of really bad retouchers out of business. The only real selling point for us is 64 bit on the Mac. I worked on 8 6GB files last week, and really, really could have used access to all my RAM.

[livin4lax09]

I find cs4 has everything I need and more. So.... I will not be upgrading to cs5.

[jorgemonkey]

I'm still using CS2, and I'm debating on whether to upgrade or not. I'm finding I'm doing 90% of my editing in Lightroom, and I'm only bringing stuff into PS for adding logo to images, or cloning out an object (which doesn't happen often). I also have the Nik ColorEfex filter set that is the last reason I bring images into Photoshop.

[JETA]

Please see "Content Aware Fill..."

Oh MY GOSH! I came on here just to see if someone has mentioned this. Content aware fill is a BEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUTIFUL thing!

[drg]

Adobe has announced more features for the PS-CS5 release including the Lens Correction tools in ACR 6 and in Lightroom 3.

Here's the link to the news item and to the video.

Lens Correction in ADOBE Lightroom 3 and ACR 6

This is RAW based correction so it requires either the plug-in functionality of ACR 6 or using LR3 to generate the corrections. If you are using an older version of Photoshop CS, the changes, if made in Lightroom, will only transfer to PS if needed via a real copy and much more disk and memory space, not a virtual sidecar (XMP) data file as with the new PS-CS5 release.

The good news is that with the tools ADOBE is releasing along with the new versions, a user can correct/fix/improve a wide range of optical issues with any lens in their arsenal that generates a RAW image. Alone this may be worth the cost.

Of course you should easily be able to 'go backwards' and apply this news tool to old RAW files that just weren't worth the effort.

Watch the video and read Hogarty's notes and share what you think. Also note the 'quality' lens choices used for the repair samples. These aren't entry level units!

[jorgemonkey]

Here is some fantastic examples of using the Content Aware Filter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ScWu7pG7r0

[daq7]

Yeah, I need to do more research, but the content aware fill ability alone will make it pretty likely I will upgrade.