Discussion of CS5 Pros and Cons
pathfinder
Super Moderators Posts: 14,703 moderator
Richard recently posted his experience with CS5 - both good and bad - in another thread.
I am taking the liberty of reposting his comments here so they do not get buried deep in another thread, because I think he offers much to think about and discuss.
This is his post ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I've been using the trial version of CS5 for a couple of weeks now so I thought I might share some observations. I haven't tried to find and use every new thing, but only have used it in my normal workflow. Still, it might be useful to some. I had been using CS3 up until now, so some of the stuff that was new to me is probably old hat to CS4 users.
Download and installation were painless enough, though it irked me a bit that once I completed the installation, it told me that I had to install another 90 MB of updates and there was yet another update the following day. Having been through the upgrade process before, I expected to lose my preferences and was not disappointed. Mysteriously, a few presets were imported by the installer--curves, for example--but others--custom crop sizes--were not. And, of course, actions were ignored altogether, so I had to do the usual hack to copy them into the appropriate directory. Most of them worked as before, but a few keyboard shortcuts that I had been using were no longer recognized and one now has a mysterious pause in the middle of it. One would think that Adobe could figure out by now how to import all the customizations that loyal users have done over the years, but one would be wrong. Grumble, grumble. The installer mucked with my external device settings, so that my external drive and card reader started prompting me about what to do when I connected them. Not a big deal to reset the default, but an unnecessary annoyance. Adobe still has a lot to learn about installers.
Bridge looks a little different but so far I haven't found anything new that's especially useful. The installation did import my keywords, workspaces and a few ACR presets automatically. There are a few new EXIF field filters that might come in handy at some point. PS now has a mini-Bridge included. I'm used to working with Bridge on one program tab and PS on another. I haven't done any testing to see if the mini-bridge saves memory compared to what I was doing, but it would be nice if it did. I did see a few glitches when culling a set of pics rapidly--it seemed to have trouble keeping up and stopped responding to ctl-number for assigning ratings and once it popped up a warning that meta-data writes pending and data would be lost if I didn't go for a coffee break. It also got into a strange state when it maxed out memory, but I was able to kill it and restart it without data loss. The Photoshop Services script is no longer available, which for me means that I can't upload to SmugMug directly from Bridge.
ACR 6.1 is a big improvement over 4.6. I haven't sampled all of the enhancements yet, but the thing I was most interested in--noise reduction--seems to work very well indeed. I've only had to resort to Noiseware a few times in the past two weeks. I think I will probably be using it automatically through ISO 1600, but after that, I'm not so sure. Still, that's a big step forward. Sadly, scroll wheels are still not recognized by the ACR sliders, which is a real drag for people who like to work with a mouse.
My real concern was whether CS5 was going to be too much for my 2 and 1/2 year old 3 GB machine to handle. ACR previews now have a noticeable lag when I adjust the controls, whereas with 4.6, there was no latency. Not surprising since the processing pipeline is longer. PS installed with OpenGL hardware support disabled, but since my graphics card meets Adobe's minimum requirements I enabled it. Big mistake. Apart from significant tiling when repainting the previews, there is a bug which causes PS to go south when the machine returns from sleep. It also can cause Windows (XP) to freeze entirely and require a forced power-down restart. Not good. My impression is that with the exception of smooth preview resizing, no significant functionality is lost if you are sticking with the PS standard edition and not using 3D or other extended edition goodies. If you're running an older machine, I would encourage you to take advantage of the 30 day trial before buying the upgrade. I don't doubt that it runs much better on newer, beefier hardware.
Finally, PS itself. Content-aware cloning, healing and fill are not magic, but they are going to save me a lot of time, I think. If you think you are going to be able to heal your ex out of a pic with a click of the mouse, you will be disappointed. But for more routine tasks, it's great. For example: sometimes I have to straighten a shot in which the subject is close to the edge. The rotation leaves blank space, which I prefer to fill rather than crop. That used to be a laborious cloning process, but in many cases I was able to select the blank space with the magic wand, hit content-aware fill and it was done. Doesn't work all the time, mind you, but I have seen it do some fairly sophisticated things. In any event, even when it fails it gets you part way there. In general, the less complex the surroundings are, the better it works, which is what one would expect.
HDR is also significantly improved. I don't use it all that much and have never used Photomatix, so I can't compare the two, but besides enhanced controls, it now offers automatic ghost removal. I only tried it a few times and it worked very well. That's going to be a big timesaver for me and may encourage me to try using HDR more often in street shooting, where something's always moving. Additionally, you can apply all of the controls to a single image if you want to imitate that over-the-top HDR look. I don't, really, but I know many people love it. Calculation and conversion are still very resource intensive and it takes a long time on my machine, but not noticeably longer than it used to.
The UI is a little different from CS3. It's a little more flexible, but mainly it puts old wine into a new bottle. There are a couple of new features that absolutely rock: the rule of thirds grid overlay when cropping is a big help in composition. The mask panel is also a timesaver and being able to control mask density independent of layer opacity is just great. There's a vibrance adjustment layer, which is nice but doesn't work in LAB mode. I thought I had heard something about shadow/highlight as an adjustment layer, but if it's there I haven't found it.
I'm not a graphic artist, so I haven't even looked at the new brushes or puppet warp. Maybe they'll come in handy someday, dunno. It looks like a few old bugs have been fixed--the vanishing point filter seems to be more stable than it was in CS3 and a peculiar problem I used to have with the polygonal lasso tool is gone. Some of the old filters still only work in eight bit mode. Guess they always will.
Bottom line: my machine is marginal for this software, but unless something terrible happens in the next week, I'm going to pop for the upgrade. I think it's worth it.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I am taking the liberty of reposting his comments here so they do not get buried deep in another thread, because I think he offers much to think about and discuss.
This is his post ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I've been using the trial version of CS5 for a couple of weeks now so I thought I might share some observations. I haven't tried to find and use every new thing, but only have used it in my normal workflow. Still, it might be useful to some. I had been using CS3 up until now, so some of the stuff that was new to me is probably old hat to CS4 users.
Download and installation were painless enough, though it irked me a bit that once I completed the installation, it told me that I had to install another 90 MB of updates and there was yet another update the following day. Having been through the upgrade process before, I expected to lose my preferences and was not disappointed. Mysteriously, a few presets were imported by the installer--curves, for example--but others--custom crop sizes--were not. And, of course, actions were ignored altogether, so I had to do the usual hack to copy them into the appropriate directory. Most of them worked as before, but a few keyboard shortcuts that I had been using were no longer recognized and one now has a mysterious pause in the middle of it. One would think that Adobe could figure out by now how to import all the customizations that loyal users have done over the years, but one would be wrong. Grumble, grumble. The installer mucked with my external device settings, so that my external drive and card reader started prompting me about what to do when I connected them. Not a big deal to reset the default, but an unnecessary annoyance. Adobe still has a lot to learn about installers.
Bridge looks a little different but so far I haven't found anything new that's especially useful. The installation did import my keywords, workspaces and a few ACR presets automatically. There are a few new EXIF field filters that might come in handy at some point. PS now has a mini-Bridge included. I'm used to working with Bridge on one program tab and PS on another. I haven't done any testing to see if the mini-bridge saves memory compared to what I was doing, but it would be nice if it did. I did see a few glitches when culling a set of pics rapidly--it seemed to have trouble keeping up and stopped responding to ctl-number for assigning ratings and once it popped up a warning that meta-data writes pending and data would be lost if I didn't go for a coffee break. It also got into a strange state when it maxed out memory, but I was able to kill it and restart it without data loss. The Photoshop Services script is no longer available, which for me means that I can't upload to SmugMug directly from Bridge.
ACR 6.1 is a big improvement over 4.6. I haven't sampled all of the enhancements yet, but the thing I was most interested in--noise reduction--seems to work very well indeed. I've only had to resort to Noiseware a few times in the past two weeks. I think I will probably be using it automatically through ISO 1600, but after that, I'm not so sure. Still, that's a big step forward. Sadly, scroll wheels are still not recognized by the ACR sliders, which is a real drag for people who like to work with a mouse.
My real concern was whether CS5 was going to be too much for my 2 and 1/2 year old 3 GB machine to handle. ACR previews now have a noticeable lag when I adjust the controls, whereas with 4.6, there was no latency. Not surprising since the processing pipeline is longer. PS installed with OpenGL hardware support disabled, but since my graphics card meets Adobe's minimum requirements I enabled it. Big mistake. Apart from significant tiling when repainting the previews, there is a bug which causes PS to go south when the machine returns from sleep. It also can cause Windows (XP) to freeze entirely and require a forced power-down restart. Not good. My impression is that with the exception of smooth preview resizing, no significant functionality is lost if you are sticking with the PS standard edition and not using 3D or other extended edition goodies. If you're running an older machine, I would encourage you to take advantage of the 30 day trial before buying the upgrade. I don't doubt that it runs much better on newer, beefier hardware.
Finally, PS itself. Content-aware cloning, healing and fill are not magic, but they are going to save me a lot of time, I think. If you think you are going to be able to heal your ex out of a pic with a click of the mouse, you will be disappointed. But for more routine tasks, it's great. For example: sometimes I have to straighten a shot in which the subject is close to the edge. The rotation leaves blank space, which I prefer to fill rather than crop. That used to be a laborious cloning process, but in many cases I was able to select the blank space with the magic wand, hit content-aware fill and it was done. Doesn't work all the time, mind you, but I have seen it do some fairly sophisticated things. In any event, even when it fails it gets you part way there. In general, the less complex the surroundings are, the better it works, which is what one would expect.
HDR is also significantly improved. I don't use it all that much and have never used Photomatix, so I can't compare the two, but besides enhanced controls, it now offers automatic ghost removal. I only tried it a few times and it worked very well. That's going to be a big timesaver for me and may encourage me to try using HDR more often in street shooting, where something's always moving. Additionally, you can apply all of the controls to a single image if you want to imitate that over-the-top HDR look. I don't, really, but I know many people love it. Calculation and conversion are still very resource intensive and it takes a long time on my machine, but not noticeably longer than it used to.
The UI is a little different from CS3. It's a little more flexible, but mainly it puts old wine into a new bottle. There are a couple of new features that absolutely rock: the rule of thirds grid overlay when cropping is a big help in composition. The mask panel is also a timesaver and being able to control mask density independent of layer opacity is just great. There's a vibrance adjustment layer, which is nice but doesn't work in LAB mode. I thought I had heard something about shadow/highlight as an adjustment layer, but if it's there I haven't found it.
I'm not a graphic artist, so I haven't even looked at the new brushes or puppet warp. Maybe they'll come in handy someday, dunno. It looks like a few old bugs have been fixed--the vanishing point filter seems to be more stable than it was in CS3 and a peculiar problem I used to have with the polygonal lasso tool is gone. Some of the old filters still only work in eight bit mode. Guess they always will.
Bottom line: my machine is marginal for this software, but unless something terrible happens in the next week, I'm going to pop for the upgrade. I think it's worth it.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Pathfinder - www.pathfinder.smugmug.com
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
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My quick input to the CS5 experience on a Mac Pro 8 core 16 gig RAM:
The biggest immediate gain is the 64 bit operation. CS4 would only recognize 3 gig of RAM and I was getting out of memory messages. That doesn't happen with the 64 bit CS5.
Lost some functionality / features / tools in 64 bit. Sorry I can't remember which tools. Then again I can't remember what I had for breakfast. Wait did I have breakfast? Adobe says to regain these tools to restart in 32 bit mode????? This defeats the purpose of 64 bit program! Lame!
Also lost Genuine Fractals, Neat Image and my Canon ipf5000 Photoshop print export plugin. The companies involved have said they are working on this and will have an update. The sooner the better!
Currently I have both CS5 and CS4 installed. Kind of a pain.
Sam
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I was all set to upgrade to CS5 when I found out that it won't work on my G5 Mac. This was an expensive machine which has dual processors and 8 gigs of memory. I'm not ready to buy a new computer so I guess I'm out of luck.
What ever happened to universal binaries?
Upgrading RAM is pretty Cheap and easy to do, don't you think?
I notice when I have PS4 or AE open, I am still only using about 1800MB of my RAM. Only when I go to render do I need and use more RAM.
Also, out of the three major upgrades I did...adding the SSD was the real-deal-Holyfield! For the Money, it trumped my $1000 Quadro FX graphics card. So much so that I am waiting as I write for my new machine parts to Show up so that I can build a Processing-machine-only utilizing two SSD's one for install, one for read/write, D/C'd from the Internet totally.
One very interesting thing about the addition of the SSD, I haven't had any crashes since then. Before I could lock up AE pretty often, but now...it just doesn't happen.
Thanks,
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
Yeah, understand : you have a 32 bit machine vis the 3 Gb or is it 4Gb total it can see and use?
I guess I missed it...what processor/CPU et cetera do you run?
Power mac? Thats a laptop, right? I was thinking of doing the same to my Gf's laptop...
It may take a bit, but prices will certainly fall as soon as soon as competition heats up on them. With our present economy, it could take a bit for those fires to light~
All I can say is, I thought this old ( bottom rung) Q6600 2.4 GHTZ quadcore with 8GB RAm was just simply O L D !
But it turns out, it is the Slow as H Standard HDD's, not the processor. The HDD's in intensive programs need read/write capability and the bottleneck is/was the HDD's.
That SSD just screamed new life instantly. Intel has a tool kit that I run about once per week to keep it sharp and basically I keep the SSD as my primary drive with Win7 and Adobe and a few other little hogs on it, but still am using only about 70Gb. ( of 160GB) If I wanted to get lean and mean, I could get the thing back down to about 50GB easy and 40GB with a few whines along the way~
Firefox and lots of other things I regularly use are installed on my other regular HDD's. I actually get a kick-out-of waiting for other HDD programs to open now a days...
I can only imagine how pleased you'll be when you take the plunge.
One final word. I used to spend literally hours rendering video's out of After effects. And now, by comparison, Where a 50-GB Quicktime movie might have taken, say a bit over 3 hours, it now takes less than an hour. And where I used to look at my CPU meter and Ram usage and see little activity, I now often have readings of 2 or 4 MB of Ram Left, and All four CPU's are at 100% for the entirety...the SSD is making my machine do some work!...Quite a change!
The SSDs sound very worthwhile.
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
Lenovo ThinkPad T61: Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 @2 GHz. I believe the front side bus runs at 667 MHz. It has a 7200 RPM internal drive and an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics card with 512 MB of memory. It was a solid middle-of-the-road machine when purchased and is still perfectly adequate for my other computing needs.
Also, out of the three major upgrades I did...adding the SSD was the real-deal-Holyfield! For the Money, it trumped my $1000 Quadro FX graphics card.
One very interesting thing about the addition of the SSD, I haven't had any crashes since then. Before I could lock up AE pretty often, but now...it just doesn't happen.
Thanks,[/QUOTE]
What brand SSD did you get and from whom??
Right here Art: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167024
The two I bought on Friday were part of the Fathers Day Sale...dropped 'em down to $399 each.
HTH
I know that machine well I had it for work for three years with 4GB of memory, just got moved to a W500 with 8GB and 64bit OS and it is faster. However having said that the thing that I am trying to find out is do any of the new programs support multithreading? So that the application load balances to some degree across the dual cores? I have hit problems with my machine running CS3 where Core1 hits 100% so I get no real speed.
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