CS2 vs CS3

[Lounge Lizard]

Does anybody find CS3 to be noticeably slower than CS2? Maybe it needs a bit more memory but it seems so sluggish compared with CS2 running on the ame machine.

[Roger_Provins]

I have not noticed any speed drop with CS3 - if anything it seems a bit faster. I have just an average PC with P4 3.2 GHz and 2048 MB RAM. CS3 program and its scratch disk of different hard drives.

[ermintrude]

I havent tried CS3 but moving from CS to CS2 was insanely slower...I still really hate opening/closing PS, it just takes eons...

[Seven]

You definately need 1gb of memory and a fast machine to cope.

I had CS3 on my old PC and it was unbelievably slow at shutting down.

With an intel core CPU and the extra RAM it's as quick as CS was

[Roger_Provins]

I've just timed CS3 on my computer (which is nothing special - see above). Opening 4 seconds, closing 1 second. This is when it's been open previously the same day. I guess it must leave something in memory even after it's closed. It takes 10 seconds to open the first time each day.

[Seven]

Crikey you are going to have me timing mine now shall get back to you on that one

[radiogandy]

Can't afford CS3 at the moment. So I run CS2, and also Elements 4. I know it sounds a bit daft but Elements 4 is good enough for 90% of my projects and it is much much quicker. I can nearly 'open with', do the job, 'save as' and shut down while CS2 would still be loading !

Slight exaggeration but only slight.

[Monobod]

I hear from members in our club that CS3 is much better at RAW conversion. I am still a bit reluctant to spend the pennies, but I know I will eventually succumb. I have a DELL with AMD Athlon X64 dual processor and 2 gbytes of RAM and CS3 runs very well. I do not expect CS3 to be any slower, at least I hope not.

[Meredith]

I haven't found CS3 to be slower than CS2 on my system.

[RichardSibley]

If you are using it primarily for raw conversion, look at Adobe Lightroom - it's a lot cheaper than Photoshop and I find myself using it for the majority of my editing.

I haven't noticed a huge difference between CS2 and CS3 in terms of speed.

[Monobod]

If you are using it primarily for raw conversion, look at Adobe Lightroom - it's a lot cheaper than Photoshop and I find myself using it for the majority of my editing.

I haven't noticed a huge difference between CS2 and CS3 in terms of speed.

I have CS2 already, is Lightroom cheaper than the CS3 upgrade? Upgrades to Photoshop seem valid for at least two editions, so I could skip CS3 this time, if the RAW converter in Lightroom is the same as CS3. This might be a cheaper option. Convert RAW in Lightroom to a tif, then use CS2 for enhancement.

Your advice would be most welcome here, thanks.

[Benchmark]

I still have CS2 on one of our desktop machines (Compaq Deskpro with 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, 1.5 GB RAM and 250 GB Maxtor HDD).

Time taken to load CS2 was 8 seconds (first time) and around 7 seconds when re-opening.

The time taken to load CS3 on a second identical machine was 13 seconds (first time) and 5 seconds when re-opening.

I also use CS3 on my Toshiba Tecra laptop (Pentium M 1.8 1 GB RAM).

The time taken to load CS3 was 22 seconds (first time) and just 3 seconds when re-opening. (I tried this a few times, as I was surprised how quickly it re-loaded).

In all cases, CS3 shut down instantly provided no files were open.

From the above, it will be seen that CS3 takes a little longer to load first time, but actually re-loads faster in the same Windows session (provided the memory blocks have not been re-written). Once open, CS3 seems to run just as quickly as CS2, but adjusting very large files (scanned from medium format) does require a little patience.

I find the RAW converter in CS3 much more competent than CS2 (especially the ability to adjust sharpening, fill light, etc), but in other respects I don’t see much difference between the two.