i have ps7 but have always been tempted to upgrade, not that i've found any particular need as such. But have heard that the only main difference since ps7 is new brushes and the ability to wrap text to a curve.

just wondered if this was actually true.


cheers,
Mike

Depends on the kind of work you do. What do you do?

Theres perhaps not as much new as there should be. But Important and genuinely useful stuff since 7 includes - Camera RAW, HDR, editable 16 bit, Shadow Highlight, Smart Objects. If any of this is useful to you then its worth upgrading.

when was liquify introduced? to me that was a huge time saver, depending on area.

and only if done properly. but half the time i gotta clone in texture back over the smeared pixel tracks to restore it, but still saves time.

As Mark said, the "basic" stuff is still there for color correction, masking, etc., but there have been a ton of new tools added since version 7. Some of my favorites, lens distortion, blend layers, auto align, smart filters, Bridge, Shadow/Highlight recovery, b/w conversion, brightness & contrast adjustment that is 100% better, new magic wand selections, new cloning engine, and so much more.

Liquify was first introduced Photoshop 6 - but was improved in 7. The best and most important upgrade was probably 5 to 6. Photoshop 6 was extremely powerful, and much more than just "basic".

90% of the tools most professionals use every day were available in Photoshop6. They have done a few things for amateur users since then to make the existing tools easier and more obvious for them to use. But most of THE FUNCTIONALITY still existed in 5 and 6, its just that it was hidden away and required a little more work to get to it

Every upgrade the main thing they seem to concentrate on is the damn interface, and crikey what a mistake they made in CS3 there!

A couple more I'm aware of:
* Revamped/improved Curves dialog
* Ability to customize menus, keyboard shortcuts
* Automation improvements, e.g.:
> Events manager
> Scripting enhanced
> Russell Brown scripts (upgrades to previous versions)
> Availability of user-written scripts for PS and Bridge

And native Intel Mac support! Ditto to Shadow/Highlight--I use it all the time.

And native Intel Mac support! Ditto to Shadow/Highlight--I use it all the time.

There are a few things that Adobe still needs to fix. Scanning using the TWAIN in PS to my Epson 3200 is completely broken. It's the usual circle of pointing fingers, Adobe blames Apple, Apple blames Epson, Epson blames Adobe. I don't know if the problem manifests itself with other scanners, but I've tried the latest Epson driver and it's a no go under OSX 10.5.2. (The work around is to use the stand alone Epson Scan software rather than trying to scan directly from PS)

Most of my major third party filters have been updated to Universal Binary versions, but there are a few that no longer work in CS3 running native Intel. BUZZ being one of them. It works if I run under Rosetta, but that's a step backwards. Since the developers of BUZZ apparently have gone out of business, I'm looking for an alternative.

Hi Swampy,

I use a couple of HP scanners, and TWAIN works fine. Of course I'm on a PC, not an Apple. Still, I rarely use it. Even though it does work, It uses the stand alone software anyway, only I can't get to all of the options. Also it has to load the software for each scan, which is slow! I find it's better to just use the stand alone software, save as a file, and then bring it into photoshop.

I've been using the Epson Scan standalone software in Leopard with an Expression 1600 and happily scanning hundreds of old family photos. It's not biggie to take the resulting batch of images and gang-open them in Photoshop for editing later. Even doing a single scan this way shouldn't be too bad. Actually, I haven't used TWAIN access from inside Photoshop for a loooong time! Also, Epson Scan does batch scanning (make multiple selections in the preview and scan them all into separate files in one shot), which saves tones of time.

Then there's always VueScan for accessing pretty much any scanner in OS-X.

Plugs... The scaning work around is no big deal, but when I have a number of photos to scan, I prefer to scan several at a time, bring them into Photoshop and use PS's auto crop and rotate to save out separate files. PS does a pretty good job and I don't have to worry about the transparent corners I sometimes get when I crop and straigten manually.