CS3 v. CS5 - Any reason to upgrade?

Now that CS5 has been out for a while, I am curious about whether folks using it find significant advantages over CS3. I do black and white and do not do extensive retouching beyond spotting. I use curves and selective sharpening and masking for darkroom style control. My color is digital and I use Lightroom for that, so I do not need the upgraded ARC and other color features. I do not do video. Given that Ctein had recently panned CS5 on The Online Photographer, I am wondering if there is any reason to spend the $200/300 on an upgrade.

One nice feature in CS5 that helps with spotting is the "content aware" option on the healing brush. If you have a spot in an area with with high contrast, such as spanning a straight line, content aware will general get it correct on the first try, eliminating all the futzing around that is otherwise required to keep details such a this looking natural.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ed Richards

Now that CS5 has been out for a while, I am curious about whether folks using it find significant advantages over CS3. I do black and white and do not do extensive retouching beyond spotting. I use curves and selective sharpening and masking for darkroom style control. My color is digital and I use Lightroom for that, so I do not need the upgraded ARC and other color features. I do not do video. Given that Ctein had recently panned CS5 on The Online Photographer, I am wondering if there is any reason to spend the $200/300 on an upgrade.

---

The only reason I could see that you might want to upgrade would be for the content aware filter, which is a great improvement over the clone and spot healing tools.

On the other hand, Adobe left out the "No Color Management" option in CS5 in what must be one of the greatest brain dead decisions they ever made. There are workarounds and Adobe is apparently working on a patch but meanwhile I much prefer to print with CS3.

Sandy

Quote:

---

Now that CS5 has been out for a while, I am curious about whether folks using it find significant advantages over CS3. I do black and white and do not do extensive retouching beyond spotting. I use curves and selective sharpening and masking for darkroom style control. My color is digital and I use Lightroom for that, so I do not need the upgraded ARC and other color features.

---

Based on your needs you shouldn't need to upgrade.

Quote:

---

Given that Ctein had recently panned CS5 on The Online Photographer, I am wondering if there is any reason to spend the $200/300 on an upgrade.

---

Over the years I have learned not give Ctein much credence about most of his opinions. I guarantee you Ctein will upgrade to CS5 (or get a free upgrade from Adobe).

Don Bryant

I have follow up questions to Ed's. I have one copy of CS3 Suite and three CS4 suites, so upgrading for me is a much more expensive ordeal. The obvious thought is to only update CS3 to CS5, because the changed many quick keys from CS3 to CS4 it's confusing to jump back and forth. But that is the oldest machine that has CS3.

Will going from CS3 to CS5 make it easier to jump from one machine with CS4 to a machine with CS5?

Has anyone tried CS5 on an older 2x3ghz Dual Core Intel machine with 13GB RAM and an video card upgrade?
How is the performance?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sanking

On the other hand, Adobe left out the "No Color Management" option

Sandy

---

Ugh. That makes it a super pain to make custom profiles.

You have to upgrade every three cycles to retain upgrade pricing, so I think you can wait until CS6 is offered and still get the $200 (or whatever they rip us for) upgrade pricing. If you wait until CS7 then you have to buy the whole works all over again.

It might not be an issue yet but hardware and OS requirements will change and, if you want to work with RAW files from current digital cameras, you'll be forced to upgrade to use modern equipment.

Ed, at your mention I read Ctein's rant on CS5. And frankly after using CS5 heavily for a few months-with my workflow-I find none of the issues he mentioned. There was some hicups with slow filters at first but the next update seemed to fixed this. The photo merge function works just fine-I use it daily and every tool I work with works fine on 16 bit files on 64 bit CS5 on a mediocre 8GB 64 Bit Windows 7 machine. I can't quite figure out why he is having so many problems. As SK said the Content Aware Filter is a revelation for fixing some issues-for me this filter alone makes the upgrade worth the cost. You don't use ACR but I do and the new noise reduction is superb.

For me, the content aware feature is worth the price of upgrade. B&H (and I'm sure others) has CS5 upgrade software for $50 off until Dec 4th.

Gale

Kirk, FWIW, Ctein's post was specifically about CS5 for Mac. There are any number of reasons why that might behave differently from CS5 for Windows.

Anyway, I upgraded recently from CS3, mostly to be able to use the latest ACR. After using CS5 for a few months, I'd say that other than in raw conversions, CS3 would still be fine for my pattern of light-duty use. In particular, nothing has changed in the way I work with film scans. I've tinkered with content-aware fill and it seems as though it ought to be useful, but so far there hasn't been any situation in which it's really made a difference for me.

FWIW, I'm using it on a 32-bit Windows Vista machine with 4GB of RAM. I stuck to 32-bit because I have too many legacy applications and drivers to take the risk of a failed upgrade blowing up the computer that I rely on for work as well as play. But if I routinely worked with large files I can see that performance would be pretty sluggish with my current setup, and I think a bit worse with CS5 than with CS3. I'd probably invest in a dedicated 64-bit Windows workstation equipped with CS5.