Any Reason To Now Buy CS6?

I have Photoshop CS5. I was going to upgrade to Photoshop CS6 only because I didn't want to lose my ability to get upgrade discounts in the future (CS7, CS8, etc.) after Adobe switched to its "only one generation back" upgrade policy. There didn't appear to be anything in CS6 itself that was of any great interest to me. But now we know that CS6 will be the last version of Photoshop that one can buy so future upgrade discounts are no longer a reason to buy CS6 (AFAIK). I'm not going to subscribe to CC, I'll just stick with whatever final version of Photoshop I have.

So now I'm wondering whether it perhaps would be a good idea to buy CS6 just to have the final version of Photoshop that can be purchased even though I don't think I have any great use for it. I can't really think of a good reason to do that except that somehow it just seems like it's usually a good idea to have the latest version of software rather than older versions (e.g. compatibility with future operating systems, computers, etc.)

What do those of you more knowledgeable than I am about software, computers generally, Adobe's new policy, etc. think? Spring for $169 or whatever it is to buy the upgrade to CS6 even though I don't think I need it or just stick with CS5? No need to talk about subscribing, I'm not going to do that.

Brian,

I would upgrade to CS6. It's worth it for the Background Save feature, better memory management, and graphics performance. Content Aware Fill and the Patch Tool are also better than in CS5.

Also, as you state, "...to have the latest version of software rather than older versions (e.g. compatibility with future operating systems, computers, etc.) is another good reason to upgrade.

I am staying with CS6 until something equal to, or better than PS comes along.

--P

Ditto

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Originally Posted by Preston

Brian,

I would upgrade to CS6. It's worth it for the Background Save feature, better memory management, and graphics performance. Content Aware Fill and the Patch Tool are also better than in CS5.

Also, as you state, "...to have the latest version of software rather than older versions (e.g. compatibility with future operating systems, computers, etc.) is another good reason to upgrade.

I am staying with CS6 until something equal to, or better than PS comes along.

--P

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Same here. I really like content-aware tools for clean-up of a negative.
There are not a lot of the tools I use in PS but these definitely.

Cheers,

Luc

How do I upgrade from CS5 to CS6? I went to adobe website, but could only find Creative Cloud version.

Jon

Jon,

Use Adobe's 'chat' feature and tell them what you want to do. That's what I did, including having them ship a boxed disc, rather than a download.

You might also check a third party vendor such Amazon, Staples, etc..

--P

Thanks, upgrade now only available through Adobe, not amazon, staples, b&h etc. All agents are busy, oh well.

Jon

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Originally Posted by Jon Shiu

All agents are busy, oh well.

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That's the sound of mobs of people making their last purchase from Adobe for a verrry long time...

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Originally Posted by Greg Miller

That's the sound of mobs of people making their last purchase from Adobe for a verrry long time...

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I think you may be correct!

Thanks for all the responses. I'll take the advice and buy. When I was looking I had the same problem Jon mentions. I planned to call but maybe the chat room is a better idea.

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.

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.

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=

Yes, but at $599.

Jon

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Originally Posted by 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=

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Originally Posted by Jon Shiu

Yes, but at $599.

Jon

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Oops, thanks, I should have noticed that.

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...

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.

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Originally Posted by darrelll

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Corran

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.

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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.

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.

Well... I also shoot 4x5 and 8x10 as well...