I was wondering which would benefit me most ,as i make steps to be better at photography ?
I currently have and use an older version of Photo Shop 6.0 , and was debating on upgrading to CS 3 or CS 4 ?

or would i be better off getting an expo disk and attempt to get better color white balance at time of exposure ?

i shoot mostly wild life and high school sports ...with a canon 20d ,which my next step is upgrading the camera body and grab some better lens as money allows me ...

anyhow i am not real familar with either of the products and as to how much of an improvement they will make ...
like is there a huge advantage to jumping from 6.0 to CS3 OR 4 ?
would an expo disk give me a better all around image qaulity to start with ...
generally i use photoshop to sharpen , and adjust the exposure a little in levels and use to create collages ... i think it would be a great advantage with cs4 editing raw images as it seems now when i do edits in my canon raw program then convert them to JPEG to further adjust in photoshop you loose something , especially when shooting at high ISO's in available light , and the noise reduction software i use does not work in raw , wished i could find something that did , that would be huge ... i use noise ware pro and it does a great job on jpeg images ...but if you sharpen images in raw - Photo pro , then it also sharpens the noise in jpeg ...
anyhow i am just trying to create better all around images , and it seems no matter what i shoot i have to do slight adjustments and sharpening to get them to POP ... i lost my Photo shop disk , and that also bothered me as if i buy an upgrade CS 3 OR CS4 and upgrade or change my pc , will i be able to copy these over to the new pc without loosing them since i cant find my original Photoshop 6.0 ?
anyhow again thanks Bill B

Several things you've said are unclear to me, but I'll try to say something useful.

First, you said "Photo Shop 6.0". I'm not familiar with earlier versions of Photoshop (actually, I've never used any version); might you mean Photoshop Elements 6?

About Expo Disk - I remember reading about that some time ago. Isn't it just a way of getting white balance correct at the time of shooting? It doesn't seem like a useful comparison between something like that (at what, $40 or so?) to a piece of software that costs $700.

In DPP, you can convert from raw to 16-bit TIFF and open the TIFF in Photoshop or Elements; you don't lose anything that way. It never makes any sense to edit a JPEG if you have the raw or TIFF to work on; JPEG is for the final result after all editing.

I have Noiseware Professional as a plug-in for Elements, and I can use it when editing a TIFF file. You said "if you sharpen images in raw - Photo pro , then it also sharpens the noise in jpeg". It's not clear to me exactly what you mean there. I'll reiterate that if you're doing your raw conversion in DPP and saving a file to manipulate in some version or other of Photoshop or Elements, you're MUCH better off converting to 16-bit TIFF than to JPEG.

"... it seems no matter what i shoot i have to do slight adjustments and sharpening to get them to POP ..." - join the club! (Everyone does!)

I can't comment on the licensing issues; I don't know for sure about that.

hey thanks for the reply
i have one of the earlier photoshop versions , it is not elements its 6.0 , 7.0 or cs came out shortly there after ...

i guess i was thinking of my old film days where you shot a picture and if the exposure was good you didn;t have to do anything to it ..where digital it seems that to get a really nice print result you need to sharpen it etc ... which in some ways makes it very fun as now it makes you more a process in the creating and developing of the final image (much like a darkroom did)
i was just trying to figure out which would be a better investment as my wife was allowing me to purchase one of the other for my birthday gift .. an expo disk would assist in getting white balance and color corrections at time of exposure , which would be great and maybe offset alot of editing time latter as i shoot high school sports and the lighting is often very odd ... i send the pictures in to the local paper and for the year book at our small school and was trying to create the best possible picture i can ...
with regards to photoshop and raw etc for noise reduction ... yes i can save them as a Tiff and do the edits etc , then convert to jpeg ..the issue i have is i think with the newspapers software as if i sharpen them in photoshop it messes them up ,and the pictures aren;t usable ..so i edit them in raw , sharpen them there then convert them and then do levels etc and remove noise , but then if you remove noise at that point the images come out off ... i will try what you said convert to tiff then edit and try it maybe that will work for the paper since the editing would be on the tiff file before converting it to jpeg to email to them .... hope i am making sense ..
i just thought sometype of noise reduction software would work on raw before conversition but now i understand what your saying ...

with regards to the expo disk its about $80 , and i thought maybe it would help as more i read they say get the exposure as best you can this will make better prints latter ...but wasnt sure if cs3 or a CS4 upgrade with be way more bang for the buck ....

I'd recommend you upgrade to CS4 but make sure your machine is new enough to handle it. Cs4 likes lots of memory and a fast processor.It crashed my machine (extremely slow to stop) and I had to buy a new one.