Any Reason To Now Buy CS6?

[Brian Ellis]

Thought I'd follow up on my experience in buying my Photoshop CS6 upgrade from CS5 yesterday. It took about three hours and two different Adobe chat room people to get it up and running. I was told that they don't offer it in disc form so I had to download it.

First problem was just finding out where you could buy the upgrade. Turns out that you click on the "Buy" the full scale version CS6 (not the upgrade, that doesn't appear to be offered on the "buy" page) for $690 or so, then after you click on Buy the full version you get an option to buy the upgrade. Not exactly intuitive.

Then you go through some more gyrations and when you finally confirm a purchase the "download" button on the confirm page doesn't work, which required my first chat room experience. He was trying to be helpful and seemed pretty knowledgeable but he kept asking me to provide information but when I'd go to the page where he said the information could be found the information wouldn't be there. Then when it was finally supposed to be installed I couldn't access it, which required the second chat room experience. This guy had me try 2 or 3 different things, then when they didn't work he took over my computer and figured a way to get it working.

No real point in going into the details, others probably would have better luck and in any event I don't remember everything that was tried. I got the distinct feeling that Adobe was trying to make purchase of the CS6 upgrade as difficult as possible.

In fairness I should mention that when I bought the CS5 upgrade I had a different email address than I now have. That wouldn't seem to be a big deal since I know my old address but it seemed to create a number of questions and problems. I'm still not sure if they have my current email address. I also had no problem reaching a chat room agent quickly, there was no waiting time.

[Matus Kalisky]

I would even consider buying the full CS6 (have CS3 now), but it does not seem like Adobe is willing to offer it at a discount price which would make sense as they could pick those users who are now between the 'up or out' solutions.

[Brian Ellis]

I've since learned that B&H has some Photoshop CS6 disks in stock. Wish I had known that before I went through this miserable download process.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search...op+Nav-Search=

[Jon Shiu]

Yes, but at $599.

Jon

I've since learned that B&H has some Photoshop CS6 disks in stock. Wish I had known that before I went through this miserable download process.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search...op+Nav-Search=

[Brian Ellis]

Yes, but at $599.

Jon

Oops, thanks, I should have noticed that.

[darrelll]

As a PS CS4 registered user, I opted to go via the Creative Cloud route. I HAD to upgrade as only the latest CS6 supported my D800 raw files. As a reg. user, I got 40% discount so the price was $30/mo instead of $50/mo. Adobe upgrades about every 1.5 years plus I much prefer the monthly payments vs the upfront payment plan. Plus I get Adobe's entire software catalog included which I wanted as I want to shoot and edit videos and wanted to have Premiere. So you get $3k+ of software for $30/mo. I think that's a great deal. Also all the web design software...

[Jim Andrada]

I use several Adobe products - PS, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Premier. I love the new system! It's saved me a ton of $$$

If all I used was PS, then I might see it differently, but for anyone who uses two or three of their programs (or more) this is the best deal in town.

[Corran]

I HAD to upgrade as only the latest CS6 supported my D800 raw files.

FYI, you can get Adobe's stand-alone RAW converter and convert your D800 files to *.dng files and use them with legacy software. I still use and prefer Lightroom 3. I just boot up the Adobe DNG Converter after a shoot and convert them, after which I use them just like any other RAW file in LR. A small benefit - they are also slightly smaller in size than Nikon's compressed NEF format.

[darrelll]

FYI, you can get Adobe's stand-alone RAW converter and convert your D800 files to *.dng files and use them with legacy software. I still use and prefer Lightroom 3. I just boot up the Adobe DNG Converter after a shoot and convert them, after which I use them just like any other RAW file in LR. A small benefit - they are also slightly smaller in size than Nikon's compressed NEF format.

The files are huge and converting 10-100gb of NEF's into DNG's would add a lot of PP time and that is what I did when I absolutely needed to edit a file on PS. It was very slow going with my old system. It might take 30 seconds to load a file, then any action would take 5-20 seconds... agonizing. My old system would crash if I tried to edit more than one file at a time. Plus PS CS4 only has a 32 bit version and utilizing only 3gb ram. My new system which I built specifically for my D800 still and video files is a Quad core 32gb ram 64 bit Win8 system with a 120gb SSD Boot/apps/PS Scratch disk drive that Reads/Writes at 500MB/s. USB 3.0 Card reader, 6tb of SATA3 HDD's plus a Raid 5 array. It just flies with my D200 10mp files and the giant D800 40-70mb NEF files goes pretty quick. With 32gb of ram, I've had more than a dozen files open at once and my memory usage was not more than 15% and cpu usage was no more than 25%. My system cpu maxes out when encoding video but still I have never been able to max out my memory usage... not even when I'm batch processing 50-100 files at once. Yes, I love my new PC!

I've just started upgrading my Class 10 SDHC 32gb cards to UHS-1 SDHC 32gb cards that read 80MB/s and write 40MB/s or faster. Makes a huge difference in PP large amounts of GB's worth of files.

Because of my NEF files, I needed to upgrade to CS6 and since I want to begin doing more video, I wanted several of the apps in the Creative Cloud catalog so it really made sense to go with the Creative Cloud.

[Corran]

Converting a days worth of NEFs from a commercial shoot usually takes about 10-15 minutes for me, but hey, don't let me stop you from enslaving yourself to Adobe! Just kidding. I'm using CS5 and CS6 already now, I wasn't aware of those limitations in 4.

FWIW, I built my computer with the specific goal in mind of easily editing multi-GB 4x5 scans so D800E files are a walk in the park.