CS2 and CS3

In terms of debating whether its worth moving up to CS3 from CS2 you really need to determine what applications your going to use. In my case, aside from PhotoShop I really needed Fireworks, Illustrator and Premier. All work well and the difference between CS2 & CS3 was negligable for the most part except for Premier. Premier CS3 was an absolute nightmare to work with. I began working with it in June '08 and although Adobe posted updates and patches, none of them really addressed the major problems until Nov. - Dec. Me and my partner lost a tremendous amount of time debugging and just flat out reworking too many wedding videos to mention. It's doing much better, but from now on we've decided to just stay one release back. New features or not, its not worth going through what we went through before they (Adobe) finally offered a fix.

 

Smart move, I just downloaded Lightroom 2.0 and I think I will wait on that one as well.

 

If you use and Intel Mac You Need CS3 it is that simply...
And that goes for the entire suite..

 

CS2 works on an Intel iMac

 

Yes it does but it is slow as hell, especially when you are working with multiple layers, working on Raw images, have adobe bridge open, photoshop, flash and dreamweaver all running at the same time.

I have a 17 inch MBP with with 2GB of ram and I still get totally bogged down with CS3, I wouldnt even bother to have more than one app open at a time when CS2 was the only way to go.

Bottom line is when you need performance you have to pay for it, even with CS3 I only use my MacBook Pro when I am working on the road or away from Desk, I do all my heavy lifting with a Newer 8 Core Mac Pro that is Running 16GB of Ram, I can assure you CS3 is a Ferrari compared to the moped that CS2 is

Regards

 

If you like "panos" CS3 is more powerful for stitching and snapping images.