Re: Value of upgrading from CS3 to CS6?
Content-aware fill is a big improvement, and also stitching/automerge is much better in CS5 than in earlier versions, and I suspect it will continue to improve.
64-bit processing is also worthy of note. Of course the machines have gotten faster and I have more RAM than I used to, and I haven't bothered to compare processes in my old CS2 to CS5 on my newest computer, and all of these factors are interdependent, but things that seemed to take more than 20 minutes are taking less than a minute now.
There are also other reasons just to keep everything up to date. Recently I was working on some print advertising that was simple enough to lay out in Photoshop, and we've finally settled on some house fonts for our office, and for whatever reason, it was troublesome to install the Open Type fonts in Vista on my older laptop or in XP on my office laptop, but with Win7Pro/64, CS5 in 64 bit mode, everything worked smoothly.
Re: Value of upgrading from CS3 to CS6?
Retail PS CS6 is available for d/l today.
I just installed the upgrade, for me, from CS5.
Now have to re-install all my plugins, scripts, etc...
Re: Value of upgrading from CS3 to CS6?
There's a 30 day free trial so you can see if it's worth the cost. One thing to keep in mind is the next version upgrade may extend back to CS3, so it could be cheaper in the long run to buy this upgrade if you think you will eventually do it. To me it would be just to get a 64bit version of Photoshop so you can use more memory to work on large scans.
Re: Value of upgrading from CS3 to CS6?
Well I had a look at the price of the upgrade from CS5 to CS6 - $199 - I will pass that one. The only feature I was looking at is the Content Aware Clone tool fro when you are doing a Pano and miss just a little bit of something. The upgrade to CS5 was a no brainer but this upgarde should be $99 not $199...
Cheers,
Luc