CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

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RKnecht
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p.1 #1 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

I upgraded from CS3 to CS5 when it came out and the improvements were worth the money spent. Now I find myself thinking of upgrading to CS6. From what I gather, it can utilize the GPU more so than CS5 which may improve processing time on a few projects. Since my GPU has 2GB of available memory, I think it can handle it. I am also aware I will be getting a much newer version of ACR. This is not so important as I still use Nikon's NX2 for all of my RAW conversions, but would like to see what ACR can do.

For those who did the upgrade, do you feel it was worthwhile?

Jan 12, 2013 at 02:04 PM

RustyBug
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p.1 #2 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

I went from CS3 to CS5 (demo while waiting for CS6 to release), then on to CS6 when it finally released. I also picked up LR4 at the same time.

The change from CS5 to CS6 was not the significant, imo ... other than the change in ACR and a few bells & whistles that may / may not appeal to a person.

If you are interested in the new ACR, which I find to be a significant change from the previous version then I'd suggest getting LR4 instead of upgrading to CS6. I passed on LR2 & LR3, using CS3 instead. Even though I mostly use PS, now I can comfortably use LR4 for conversion when I'm not wanting to get into layers & channels in PS.

CS5 = 97% of CS6
LR4 + CS5 = 99.999% of LR4 + CS6

I'd recommend to add LR4 to your arsenal before I'd recommend upgrade to CS6 (from CS5). It adds the newer ACR (that you are looking at CS6 for) to your capabilities and provides you with the DAM tools that complement PS.

Jan 12, 2013 at 02:27 PM

WAYCOOL
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p.1 #3 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

GPU-enhanced features added in Photoshop CS6

Adaptive Wide Angle Filter (compatible video card required)
Liquify (accelerated by compatible video card with 512 MB of VRAM)
Oil Paint (compatible video card required)
Warp and Puppet Warp (accelerated by compatible video card)
Field Blur, Iris Blur, and Tilt/Shift (accelerated by compatible video
card supporting OpenCL)
Lighting Effects Gallery (compatible video card required with 512 MB
of VRAM)
New 3D enhancements (3D features in Photoshop require a compatible video card with 512 MB of VRAM):
Draggable Shadows
Ground plane reflections
Roughness
On-canvas user interface controls
Ground plane
Light widgets on edge of canvas
IBL (image-based light) controller

If you don't use these filters than the speed improvements won't help you. I'd suggest you download the preview and see if the new CS6 features are worth it to you.

Here is a chart showing the differences.
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/buying-guide-version-comparison.html

Jan 12, 2013 at 06:44 PM

RDKirk
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p.1 #4 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

You get the ability to purchase CS7 at the upgrade price.

Jan 12, 2013 at 08:37 PM

Bernie
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p.1 #5 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

Whatever you do upgrade to the new ACR. You won't look at NX2 again. It gave my D300 a new lease on life while waiting for a successor. Since you have older Nikons as well, you will be happily surprised with the conversion capabilities -- working the highlights, controlling the noise in the shadows, the superior sharpening.

Did I mention how much faster it is? Even for those of us who do oneses, twoses, the speed difference is significant.

Jan 13, 2013 at 02:53 AM

Peter Figen
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p.1 #6 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

From a practical standpoint, there are a few things that make 6 worthwhile, but none of them are the things that Adobe might advertise to the public.

As someone who makes a large percentage of his income working daily in Ps, the features that make the biggest difference to me are 5000 pixel brushes, 1000 pixel feathers on selections and a gargantuan 15000 pixel Liquefy brush. Those three alone make it worth the price for me, as they solve hard limitations I was often up against in earlier versions. Almost everything else is fluff, as far as I'm concerned. An improved ACR is nice, but not a world changer for me as I almost always use third party options for raw processing.

For Rusty, the biggest improvement for him moving from CS3 would be full 64 bit and virtually unlimited ram allocation.

The worst thing about upgrading to CS6 is having to deal with the freaking horrible new Crop Tool, which was apparently designed by a tool. Thankfully, you can get most of the older function back by checking the appropriate preferences, but it's still broken as far as I'm concerned.

Jan 13, 2013 at 03:52 AM

RustyBug
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p.1 #7 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

+1 @ 64 bit and RAM increase capability (but that is also true of CS5) compared to CS3
+1 @ crop tool was a step backward, but I've finally gotten kinda used to it in CS6
+1 @ CS7 "upgrade price" (not that I can envision much that would be a paradigm reason for such an upgrade, but we'll see)

Jan 13, 2013 at 05:30 AM

EB-1
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p.1 #8 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

RDKirk wrote:
You get the ability to purchase CS7 at the upgrade price.

But who kows what the price and policy will be?

I would not be surprised if the upgrade were 1/2 of the cost of a full license in the future, or perhaps some version of the cloud versions will be needed. As with anything, but what you need now or in the near future.

EBH

Jan 13, 2013 at 05:45 AM

RDKirk
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p.1 #9 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

I'm confident the current policy will last at least until CS7.

As soon as they settle on a current policy, that is.

Jan 13, 2013 at 05:52 AM

Mr Mouse
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p.1 #10 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

CS6 has many more bugs then CS5. http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/problems/recent Note all 6000 bug report there are not bugs and all are not all directed at Photoshop CS6

Jan 13, 2013 at 04:22 PM

Imagemaster
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p.1 #11 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

Not only did I find it not worthwhile, but it had so many bugs that I uninstalled it and went back to CS5.

Jan 13, 2013 at 05:17 PM

Herb Houghton
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p.1 #12 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

Imagemaster wrote:
Not only did I find it not worthwhile, but it had so many bugs that I uninstalled it and went back to CS5.

thanks for the warning Tony, I'll just be happy with CS5 then.

Jan 13, 2013 at 10:10 PM

Peter Figen
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p.1 #13 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

I wouldn't worry about any so called bug reports. All software applications have a certain number of bugs, but they usually don't get much in the way of you using the program. I've been using CS6 solidly since it came out, often for ten or twelve hours a day and simply have not seen any of the problems others have listed. The only persistent problem seems to be some sort of memory leak that requires a restart once a day or so, but other than that, it's pretty solid. If I could transport the old crop tool, I'd be more than happy, but because the larger brushes are so important when working on super high res images, there's no way I'd ever consider going backward.

Jan 14, 2013 at 12:58 AM

Bifurcator
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p.1 #14 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

I also uninstalled it shortly after installing it. I got it because of all the 3D features that were supposed to be included. If you're a modeler or an animator (especially modeler) then CS6 is really going to be quite useful I think. If you're a photographer however it's a step backwards and an inconvenience in a few different ways.

There' quite a lot of BS in that "Version comparison" WAYCOOL linked to BTW. For example the very fist two items the Content-Aware Patch, and the Content-Aware Move. are listed as new tools only in CS6 yet the identical functionality exists in CS5 and CS5.5 (a free upgrade from CS5) with the only difference being one or two less keystrokes.

And so on and so forth.

I uninstalled it because it wan't stable and I didn't feel like putting up with the inconveniences. I might feel different in a year but for now I'm staying with CS5.5.

Jan 14, 2013 at 04:10 AM

Mr Mouse
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p.1 #15 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

Peter Figen wrote:
I wouldn't worry about any so called bug reports. All software applications have a certain number of bugs, but they usually don't get much in the way of you using the program. I've been using CS6 solidly since it came out, often for ten or twelve hours a day and simply have not seen any of the problems others have listed. The only persistent problem seems to be some sort of memory leak that requires a restart once a day or so, but other than that, it's pretty solid. If I could transport the old crop tool, I'd be more than happy, but because the larger brushes are so important when working on super high res images, there's no way I'd ever consider going backward.

Because you do not use much of Photoshop other do and they in turn also get bug reports about their code caused by bugs in Adobe Photoshop code. Some of Adobe bugs can be coded around still it a pain to have to keep adding code to test Photoshop version to code around Adobe bugs. Adobe bugs make other look bad and increase their support workload. Adobe only fixes bugs they feel effect a high percent of their users other are kept in new releases and are joined by new bugs which breaks third party add on. Adobe does such a poor job testing their code.

Jan 14, 2013 at 03:18 PM

James_N
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p.1 #16 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

Peter Figen wrote:
I wouldn't worry about any so called bug reports. All software applications have a certain number of bugs, but they usually don't get much in the way of you using the program. I've been using CS6 solidly since it came out, often for ten or twelve hours a day and simply have not seen any of the problems others have listed. The only persistent problem seems to be some sort of memory leak that requires a restart once a day or so, but other than that, it's pretty solid. If I could transport the old crop tool, I'd be more than happy, but because the larger brushes are so important when working on super high res images, there's no way I'd ever consider going backward.

Exactly; I've been using Photoshop CS6 for several hours every day since it was released and I haven't come across any show-stopping bugs in the normal use of the program. There are a few related to running Actions but mostly because of the underlying changes in the Javascript engine. Eventually you tune out people like Mr. Mouse because instead of embracing the changes they prefer to complain.

You can restore the old Crop Tool functionality by selecting the tool, clicking the "gear wheel" in the Options bar, and selecting "Classic Mode" from the drop down box that appears.

Jan 14, 2013 at 03:51 PM

RustyBug
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p.1 #17 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

James_N wrote:

You can restore the old Crop Tool functionality by clicking the "gear wheel" in the Options bar, and selecting the "Classic Mode" from the drop down box that appears.

Nice.

I haven't found it to be too buggy (for my use) although I do get the occasional "can't save" error message. I simply flatten the file and SAVE AS, then Ctrl-Z to unflatten and resume. Minor inconvenience that I doesn't happen a lot, and I haven't figured out the reason yet, but not a show stopper.

Mr Mouse wrote: Adobe does such a poor job testing their code.

So would if be fair to suggest that the "bugginess" of CS6 vs. CS5 is consistent with Adobe's typical "bugginess" for any new offering and that CS6.5 might be worth waiting for if there is any grave concern over the bugs issue, particularly if you are already on CS5 (rather than say CS4 or CS3).

Edited on Jan 14, 2013 at 04:22 PM · View previous versions

Jan 14, 2013 at 03:53 PM

Peter Figen
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p.1 #18 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

"You can restore the old Crop Tool functionality by selecting the tool, clicking the "gear wheel" in the Options bar, and selecting "Classic Mode" from the drop down box that appears. "

If only that were really true. Of course, that's the first thing I did, but it only partially fixes the problems. Remember when you could just plug in your cropping dimensions and crop

Yeah. Not so anymore. You now HAVE to not use the Options Bar like you used to (although you can still enter number there as well), but you have to go into a separate drop down menu and re-enter the dimensions you really want. If you only use the Options Bar, you'll get the right aspect ratio but not the right actual dimensions. Whoever at Adobe that designed that one was a complete idiot.

And there are other things. Previously, if you were in the Crop Tool, you could still hit the Cmd key and get the Move Tool. Not so anymore. You have to change out of the Crop Tool first. An extra step. Two steps forward and one step back. Oh well.

Jan 14, 2013 at 04:09 PM

RustyBug
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p.1 #19 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

No specific example, atm ... but the "extra step" isn't only in the Crop Tool.

And why in the world can you double click on a slider in ACR and it resets, but you can't do that with PS sliders

Jan 14, 2013 at 04:20 PM

Jman13
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p.1 #20 · CS5 to CS6: What will I gain?

For me, the biggest change from CS5 to CS6 was the speed. It processes significantly faster than CS5, and that was ultimately what drove me to purchase the upgrade. The adaptive wide angle correction is also really nice and quite useful, so that's been a great feature. The other new features are OK, but not really important to my work.

Jan 16, 2013 at 12:39 PM

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