Replying to What Version Of Photoshop Should I Buy?

You should choose a graphics program that is comparable and compatible with your pc or laptop, offering a performance and responsiveness you can bare with for the type of work you are doing or would like to do in the future. If you think you may upgrade your hardware soon then you can opt for the newer software.

Also keep in mind what resolution, color depth, frames per second, audio quality your work will be in. From small pictures to multi-track audio. You will consume copious amounts of ram, pagefileing, and time waiting for effects to process, not to mention the amount of space required to save the file at various progress points.

More important than the features of the software is the creativity of the artist. His or her awareness and appreciation of art, photos, music, and design will better influence their work than the limitations of the program. When I cannot afford the next big thing, I usually refine my existing work flow, analyze, and do my research.

Hope the advice helps.

I will suggest you at least get the exteneded pro version.
althrought photoshop cs4 is great for any designer or web designer
who edit photo or photo retouching.

But it might require more high end system and a lot ram to support.
Also, because it's now supported hardware accelearate card.
You might get slow perfermance when used on releatively old system.

I would give my left arm for CS4 right now, but hopefully I will win it at this adobe user group I attend in December, took a lot book reviews and tutorials but hopefully I generate the points needed for it. Anyway if you want to get the most out of photoshop then you want to get CS3 extended and that way you can work with 3D objects and what not, and because of its backwards capability anything you use such as brushes and gradient effects will rollover and be usable.

Yea really for a lot of what you'd use photoshop for you can accomplish with gimp. Photoshop has more features and more tutorials specifically designed for it, but if you only want to do basic things then it'd be a huge money savings. That said I personally prefer photoshop to gimp (at least the versions of each I've used, neither the newest) so that could play a factor too. It'd be worth trying to get a chance to test out both and judge from there.

And I now need to look into CS4, I had no clue it was out

If you boil that further, you can use GIMP. It's free and not too hard to use:

www.gimp.org

xboxrulz

If there is an option between CS2 and CS3 I would go for CS3. The biggest CS# advantages for me have been the cleaner interface and that ir runs smoother taking less memory than CS2.

But, if you are not doing professional work you really do not Need Photoshop CS3. Photoshop elements or one of Corel's image suites may accomplish what you need.

Well, CS4 just came out so all remaining CS3 copies should be quite moderately priced. If you're a post-secondary student, you might even get a discount from Adobe.

xboxrulz

If you can get cs or cs2 for a decent price comparative to cs3, go for it because, as mentioned, the additions are not pivotal to use of the program. They are significant if you use them properly but for many people the main usage of the program falls within the feature set that rarely if ever changes. This means that if you were to buy an older version it could still do 99%+ of what you want until you become adept enough to need the new additions. That said if there is a small price differential between the older and newer versions I see no reason to not buy the newest and most full featured version availible in order to get the most out of it since you'll be spending a good amount either way. So yes, do a bit of research

I went from photoshop 7 to cs3 so it was a fairly big change but I know that their isnt much change from cs2 to cs3.. But i can assure that they would have fixed some bugs, errors and added more features. The prices of cs3 will be going down although because of the new cs4 range coming out so just keep an eye open for cheap deals.

All in all photoshop is the way to go when it comes to graphics design.

It depends entirely on what you want to do with it, if you're serious about your hobby whether it be retouching or making graphics, then get CS3, if you do it every now and then and don't worry about the latest technologies, then get CS2, if you just want basic tools then get Elements