Photoshop 7 vs. CS4

SimpsonBrothers

I've been using PS7 for my editing for the last 3 years, but I'm wondering if there is a worthy advantage to getting CS4, is it worth the $700 plus the cost of a new computer to handle it?

Art Scott

....I keep PS7 around because I have over 1500 plug ins for it and it would be too expensive to upgrade all those to any of the CS versions........That is really a question only you can answer......I find the color matcher in my CS1 is better than in PS7.....I shoot raw so I went to CS and then to LightRoom.......You might want to look at Light Room......depending on how you shoot...........I know some of the CS2 and up have fixes for converging lines built in and leveling of horizons and such but hey if you tripod shoot and are very careful with your horizons that won't matter.................

Richard

SimpsonBrothers wrote:

I've been using PS7 for my editing for the last 3 years, but I'm wondering if there is a worthy advantage to getting CS4, is it worth the $700 plus the cost of a new computer to handle it?

I would sure hate to go back to PS7. Bridge was essentially unusable, ACR was a dog, no shadow/highlight command, more primitive channel mixer, no refine edge command, no HDR, and probably a number of other things that I don't recall at the moment. But it did get me where I knew how to go at the time. Dunno. If you are happy with your current workflow, the money might be better spent on new glass. OTOH, if you spend a lot of time in PP, it could be worth it. Adobe usually offers one month free trials, so you could just download it and check it out. You might want to check out LightRoom as well. It will give you all the benefits of modern RAW processing and a decent catalog database too. It costs quite a bit less and I think you could still use PS7 for the trickier stuff that LR doesn't handle. One word of caution, if your machine is three years old or more, you will not see any performance gains, and maybe even lose performance. PS and LR like memory and cycles. Just take that into account when you do your evaluation.

SimpsonBrothers

Richard wrote:

One word of caution, if your machine is three years old or more, you will not see any performance gains, and maybe even lose performance. PS and LR like memory and cycles. Just take that into account when you do your evaluation.

My current computer is about 10 years old.

I would like to get in to HDR.

Richard

SimpsonBrothers wrote:

My current computer is about 10 years old.

I would like to get in to HDR.

You definitely need a new machine for HDR. And for LR or CS4. But, man, will you be happy when you get it.

colourbox

SimpsonBrothers wrote:

CS4, is it worth the $700 plus the cost of a new computer to handle it?

Check the release history at Wikipedia, they list what changed for each version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop_release_history

The list of improvements is so long, I would never go back to 7. But what you should do, once you get upgraded, is get yourself trained on all the changes (you can use free web tutorials to do this) so that you are getting the most out of it. If you use CS4 exactly like you use 7, you'll waste your money.

By the way, the HDR feature in Photoshop itself isn't so great. Even if you got a newer Photoshop, if HDR is your focus you'd want another program. Instead of upgrading Photoshop, you could get Lightroom and an HDR plug-in for a lot less money, for example.

HarlanBear

SimpsonBrothers wrote:

I've been using PS7 for my editing for the last 3 years, but I'm wondering if there is a worthy advantage to getting CS4, is it worth the $700 plus the cost of a new computer to handle it?

I switched from PS7 to the first CS because the added features seemed worth it for me. Then upgraded to CS3 when it came out because the change seemed worth it, and for me it was. I haven't upgraded to CS4 because it seemed the changes did not seem worth it, again, for me. But I must say that the upgrade to CS3 was well worth it and I'm very happy with it - Richard pointed out some the the improvements and I will add that it's faster, better controls and really wonderfully improvements to the original editing features. But it is a personal choice. I agree that you could see the difference if you downloaded the trial version and check for yourself. And if you do want to switch and can get the right machine for $700, I'd go for it. Probably time for a system upgrade anyway. And I'm sure you know this, but make sure you have enough memory to handle the processing of CS4. I have 3GB and all runs great.
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SimpsonBrothers wrote:

My current computer is about 10 years old.

I would like to get in to HDR.

As for HDR, you should really check out Photomatix Pro. It is highly recommended by PS experts for the better results and controls, etc. I believe you can also get a trial version of it and check it out. IMO, it's really amazing once you get used to the controls.

pathfinder

In addition to all the bells and whistles that Richard described, the Quick Selection tool, introduced in CS3 and improved in CS4 is a great step up if you do editing on selections of your images. If you only do global editing, PS7 may be fine.

But for making Selections, the new Quick Selection tool and Refine Edges command, alone, were worth the upgrade to me. I can do selections that rival pros with pen tools

Cs4s performance in the creation of multi frame panos is excellent also. DOes PS 7 do anything but manual masking of panos?

If your computer is 10 years old, a whole new world beckons. That has to be a century in computer time.

A 10 year old computer will run a very long time, trying to digest a 5 frame, 15 Mb per frame, HDR rendering, I'll bet.

photorelive

if its 10 years old , then you got to get a new pc , and by the way cs4 will be nice , 7 got many problems i noticed .

colourbox

Now that we're talking about your 10 year old computer...maybe you'd better wait until you get a new computer. Although it might not seem obvious on the surface, many of the absolute coolest features in Photoshop got added because CPUs got so powerful in recent years, and your computer is not one of those. unless you have upgraded practically all components (CPU, RAM and its bus, HD, etc). If you think for a minute about how features like Smart Objects, Smart Filters, HDR, panorama stitching, Raw processing, auto layer alignment, auto layer blending (used for panos and HDR), Quick Selection and Refine Edge, one thing is in common: All of them are very, very processor intensive, heavily dependent on analysis and number crunching. Any of the "Smart" features do this on the fly, adding more load to the CPU. I believe that the reason you did not have these features in Photoshop 7 is not that nobody thought of them, but that no personal computer 10 years ago could handle them with acceptable speed. Today's computers come standard with multicore processors at 2+GHz, and this is the only reason such features do not appear to run slowly, although even then they still do sometimes...especially if you are running these features on the 12-24 megapixel images that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Assuming that your computer even meets the minimum system requirements, I wonder if you'll be frustrated at how slowly these "cool new" features run on a 10-year-old PC. My 10-year-old is a 500MHz laptop with 1GB RAM and I know how slow Photoshop CS3 feels on it.

Maybe you could try the 30-day free trial version of CS4 on your PC and see if it's going to be worth it.

mr peas

Get a new cpu first, get a good graphix card, a butt-load of ram... and then you'll be forced to upgrade to CS4. It's going to happen anyway, if you don't think so, you're just lying to yourself.

Just make sure you get a great deal on the new PC. Get a nice 22" monitor too while you're at it, they're so cheap now!