Photoshop CS6 - second thoughts

A week or so after downloading the CS6 beta, I could have brought it - I was in love with all the cool things it could do compared to to Photoshop Elements. Fortunately for me and my bank account, CS6 was not yet for sale and I was granted a cooling off period during which sanity prevailed and I uninstalled CS6. I imagine that it felt much like walking away from an affair before anyone really got hurt.

Let me be clear, my digital tools of choice for the last year have been Photoshop Lightroom (now v4) and Photoshop Elements (v10). To move from PSE10 to CS6 would cost well over NZ$930 while Lightroom and Elements together cost me about NZ$400. As I asked in the last post on this subject, were the additional features that CS6 offered over and above PSE10 worth it? No they weren't - at least not to me.

I will miss the 'adaptive wide angle tool' - that was really useful but, that aside, there was really nothing that CS6 brought to the party that I couldn't achieve in PSE10. Perhaps PSE10 isn't so polished and CS6 is definitely quicker at many tasks, but my photography is not of the mass production type (think weddings) that could benefit from the smoother CS6 workflow. Most of my time is spent deciding how to process an individual picture, not applying the actual modifications. Add to that the fact that Lightroom provides all the RAW processing abilities from CS5/6's Camera RAW (but packaged better) and it was clear that CS6 could add very little to my current post processing setup.

So that was it; CS6 is in the past, even before its arrival, and I am more convinced than ever that Lightroom and Elements make an awesome tool set for non-commercial photographers.