CS4 upgrades

[Monobod]

Hi, I am looking for a 'best buy' price but also want to be sure I am buying from a reliable source, so I thought I would ask if any of you have a suggestion. Amazon are selling it for £158.70 with free postage. Adobe want £159.85, not a lot of difference. 7dayshop do not stock it, so?

[Muffin]

The prices for Adobe PS are staggering - and you are only talking about an upgrade! I think I will stick with my stone age CS2.

[DSF]

Prices from legitimate dealers are almost always pretty close. I went with Amazon mainly because I think they ship faster than Adobe and ship for free. Also, I probably didn't mind the fact that over-priced Adobe wouldn't make as much profit if I bought through a reseller

One thing I would strongly recommend is that you download the demo from Adobe and see how it runs on your machine. Do not delete your previous version of PS yet! A lot of us have experienced issues with CS4. Check for things like delay/lag when drawing with the paint brush, delay/lag when using the cloning and healing tool. The .01 update is close to being released by Adobe but don't be surprised if some known issues aren't fixed. Make sure you have a modern and powerful video card!

If you decide to buy, when your box arrives you can just use the serial number to activate your demo copy. There is no need to reinstall.

My $.02,
Doug
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[Roger_Provins]

The only reason I'd like to upgrade is the better clone tool with preview ... it makes it so much easier to align.

I'm lucky in that the last update of ACR for CS3 included my Sony a900 ... but I do feel for those with new cameras only supported by the new ACR in CS4.

If you think about it the cost of owning Photoshop and keeping up to date is at least 75 quid a year ... on top of the exorbitant original purchase price.

A nice little earner for Adobe!

[Muffin]

Yep!

[Monobod]

It is a professional package of course, so corporations are prepared to pay for it. As photographers, we are buying a great deal of baggage that we probably will never use. But the features that we do must be worth the money to us or we would not buy it. I keep saying I will stick with what I have, until i look at the on line tutorials and see what is available and I relent.

I do have an up to date computer (dual core) with a poerful graphics card, so not concerned about performance. Thanks for the warning though. probably 4 Gbytes of RAM will be the next want/need

[Learning]

When I upgraded from CS to CS2 I ordered a user manual. It turned out that one was included in the box so I have two.
I didn't make the same mistake upgrading from CS2 to CS4. Now I don't have an up to date manual at all. Adobe do not include a printed user manual with the CS4 upgrade. The tight £$%^&*(s want another £50 for one.

[Monobod]

I now have CS4 installed. There is a video tutorial disk and a lot of stuff on the web. Some very powerful new ways of doing things, such as the curves adjustment layer where you click in the image on a colour/tone you wish to change and drag left/right in the image. Many others for hue changes and mono conversions, just amazing.

I have bought Martin Evening's CS4 for Photographers by the way, from Amazon at only £22.00 ish, £29 in Watermans.

I have his book on CS3, very useful it is too.

[Learning]

Yes the web stuff is good but a bit slow to load.
I have bought Tim Grey's Photoshop CS4 Workflow book. What a boring title. The first few pages are not any better. He wastes them telling us why workflow is important. I wouldn't have bought the book if I didn't already know that.
Then it gets better, much better. Most books tell us how clever the author is in performing tricks. This book tells us a suggested way of setting up preferences, why so, why we may not do it so, and then how to actualy use the properley set up package in a methodical way. I have learnt more in a couple days study than in the last couple of years trying to go straight into specific perceived needs.

[Monobod]

Martin's book is similar in that it decribes the interface in considerable detail. I have learnt things about the menus and the options/windows controls that I did not know before. Tab control of images is also new and powerful with linked zoom ratios etc.

[Learning]

Another possible good mixture of tutorial and reference seems to be 'Photoshop CS4 The Missing Manual' by Lesa Snider King (et all) published by O'Reilly. I used the word 'seems' because I am not really into it yet. I have used O'Reilly Oracle DB books professionally before I retired and found them accurate and understandable. They publish good stuff.