Others say...

"Got the upgrade instead of full and it was used instead of new"
When I received my product it had obviously been opened and wasn't even the right product. I ordered, and paid for, a full version and got the upgrade version. Buyer beware!

"Builds web sites at a huge price, but what about photos?"
This new version of Photoshop can help build some amazing web sites! Adobe has taken the time to add some new features that make it easy to slice up your image and export the chunks. Photoshop will let you load photographs and use them as beautiful backgrounds on your web sites. Photoshop's layering system lets you add text and other elements. Adobe has upgraded quite a few of the program's features so you might be wondering why this is a 1 star review.

If you are new to using computers to manipulate images, you might expect the industry standard Photoshop to be the best possible investment. It's practically a cultural phenomenon, taught in schools with countless books being written about it each year. My problem with the powerful Photoshop remains the very difficult and non-intuitive user interface.

Version after version the folks at Adobe add features that most often are very helpful: text handling, browsing, filter previewing, and web-site creation just to name a few. While these offerings can help many computer users for various reasons I find it sad what is offered to the customer who wants to manipulate, manage, and print photographs. Photoshop is difficult to use, and remains sorely lacking in this area. Some very powerful features are absolutely hidden unless the end-user takes classes and buys extra books. Maybe "Photoshop" is simply the wrong word for it.

The toolbar has a stale old feel that would be well served to be completely redesigned. Some tools are still hidden below other tools and are found after the end user holds down the left mouse button, or uses a hotkey. Powerful and completely elementary features, such as "crop", are still tucked away in the oddest places. A critical feature keeps its old but odd name "Stroke". In some areas Adobe has made features redundant, so new users can adapt to new ways, and old user can stick to their old methods. I can appreciate this, but I would prefer they just do it right, once. Stroke is still in the Edit menu. Crop is still in the Image menu. The fill-can still needs to be set to threshold 255 manually to make it simply fill. Wouldn't it be nice to not have to type the numbers 255 in the middle of your workflow?

Recently Adobe has had great success with a new product called "Lightroom". The product shows potential and obviously must be catering the crowd of professional photographers who have been less than thrilled with what they get out of Photoshop. Perhaps Adobe just needs some fresh new energy when it comes to making user interfaces. With a dark room style workflow, Lightroom could turn into what Photoshop should have been.

I feel there are a number of alternatives that should be looked at before buying Photoshop, studying Photoshop, or even caring about Photoshop. One new exciting tool for photographers is Nikon's Capture NX. Even non-Nikon users can now take advantage of this interesting and powerful photograph manipulation tool. At its price point photograph-software consumers should re-evaluate what they are buying and how much they are spending.

What consumers need now are effective manipulation, management and printing tools for their newly found digital collections of tens of thousands of photographs. As I approach the 10,000 mark I find the need for software that makes my life easier. All I'm using Photoshop for anymore is web design, and it seems that's what Adobe wants. But let's be frank, is this kloogy program really worth $600+? Maybe, if you build web sites.

"Adobe Photoshop CS3"
I used the free 30 day trial before purchasing, so I knew what I was getting ahead of time. I also have a friend who is an art director for a publishing company and he showed me what could be done. The only thing I would suggest is that the tutorials have some hands on parts in them like the quickbook tutorials. Other than that the turtorials are great, and the usability is realy outstanding. There is so much there that it takes a while to learn it, but if it didn't have all those features I wouldn't want it.

"Photoshop CS3"
The product is great, but the official Adobe customer service is lacking. It is based in India. I like the new fiber filter and brushes.

"No Significant reasons to upgrade"
I am a professional Graphic Designer, with a degree in Fine Arts & Graphic Design. I am sure most people who would pay for Adobe Photoshop (or any of the Adobe Suite Programs) are designers/artists.

I have been using Adobe CS3 (mostly Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign) for the past 4 months or so. I have been using Photoshop itself, since version 4.

In a sentence, Photoshop CS3 is good, but if you already are using CS2, there is no real reason to upgrade.

The added features are OK, but not worth paying for really and I have had stability issues with this newer version of Photoshop that I have not had in CS2. The two most annoying problems are: If I have a non-postscript printer set as a default, Photoshop will ALWAYS crash when I open a 2nd document (blank or otherwise). The other issue (which is also shared with InDesign) is that if I have been using Photoshop for a few hours, and switching between programs, Photoshop will vanish. It will not show up in my taskbar (WinXP SP2) nor in the running apps list in Task Manager. I need to terminate the process from the Task Manager process window, and then restart of course losing all unsaved edits.

I do not have these issues with Photoshop CS2.

Also the installation process was a real pain in the neck. It was much longer (about 25 minutes) than previous versions of Photoshop. It took me 4 days (almost 30 hours altogether) to get the suite installed on my laptop due to the activation process freezing after I entered my software key. I also had to uninstall all of my CS2 programs before I could get CS3 installed. I also needed to download Adobe's CS3 "Cleaner" utility and run it several times. It was not worth the trouble, especially considering how much I paid for the software.

Once I got it installed it worked fine (aside from the two bugs listed above). I was able to reinstall CS2 as well.

Like I said earlier the new features are just OK, not worth the trouble I went through with installation. Also the new palette system is kind of annoying. When I work I am constantly going back and forth between palettes making adjustments. The new palette dock minimizes them to a button, but you cannot have 2 open at the same time using this system. When you open one palette, the one you were previously working on closes. You can float them, but then that doesn't take advantage of the improvements of CS3. In my case I just ended up using the "legacy" pallette set up, which made my palettes work the way they did in CS2.

Adobe Photoshop is the "standard" for photo editing software, but the hard install, high price and lack of any really useful new features makes it hard to recommend this version of Photoshop over previous versions which installed easier and work faster with less resources.