Photoshop 5.5 vs. 6.0 - Is it worth it??? 1

[Turbo]

I have Photoshop 5.5 and I am curious about 6.0. I do not know of an upgrade from 5.5 and I don't want to purchase an entire new package. Is 6.0 worth the $$? Even if it was free is it worth transitioning from 5.5? Where can I find a trial version?

Please advise. Turbo

"There is a fine line between confidence and conceit" - Ken Mai

 

[gollyg]

For web design I would say that Photoshop 6 has introduced some good features, but overall it probably isn't worth the upgrade - mainly because of the buggy nature of this first release. Perhaps wait until a dot release fixes up some of these issues. If you use Fireworks in your work flow it will support Photoshop 5.5 files but not 6.0 (even Fireworks 4).

One of the touted features is the vector support. This is a good feature, but badly implemented. It is nowhere near as simple or extensive as Fireworks vector support.

The layers panel is good too - much more flexible and some of the live effects are a real plus, but it seems that they are very slow to apply - there is a considerable wait on my machine for the dialogue to open.

Also new was the progressive JPEG - this is a good feature, shaving precious K's of images (this allows you to specify multiple areas of a JPEG and save them at different quality, hence preserving text). FW4 will do this too.

If you are using PS for print work as well then it may be a different story entirely - there are some serious print features in PS6 that would make an upgrade much more attractive.

I think one of the best solutions is a combination of PS5.5 and Fireworks3/4 - you can do your heavy duty bitmap manipulations in PS and import the whole file into FW to add any vector data etc. But that's just me - what do others think?

gollyg

 

[Aneusomy]

Hi,
I too think that you should hold off until some update to 6.0 comes out. My biggest beef is that 5.5 felt 'tuned' and ran quite quickly on my PIII 800 (W2K), but 6.0 doesn't have that zippy feel. For instance, the text tool seems very slow to respond. I also agree that some of the new features (again, the vector support) could have been better integrated into the product.
Ben