Christmas Present: Photoshop CS4 Upgrade

I am a great fan of Photoshop, and I never want to miss it. But if I had to pay the full European price for it (EUR 1100 Euro or USD 1595), I’d probably explore all alternatives first.

Luckily back when CS2 was the current version, you could buy Photoshop 6 shrink-wrapped for EUR 40 and the CS2 upgrade (EUR 198) simply required any previous version, no matter how antique.

When CS3 first came out I didn’t think much of its additional capabilities. By the time I realized the power of the recovery, clarity and vibrance sliders in ACR and the black-and-white conversion mask, Lightroom 1.1 was out, so in Dec of 2007 I contemplated upgrading to Lightroom and decided against it. And since CS3 was already an old product, I decided to wait for CS4.

A few days ago Photoshop CS4 was announced and the CS4 upgrade will be available in Germany on Dec 8, 2008. That’s one month later and USD 150 more than in the US, but I don’t care. I’ve already preordered my copy at Amazon.

Now, when the upgrade finally arrives, can I really wait till Christmas to install it?

No Camera for me at Photokina 2008

Even with the flurry of new bodies shown at Photokina I don’t find the camera that I really want. We’ve reached a point where every dSLR from every manufacturer is good enough, so in many ways you cannot make a bad choise, but still, the ideal camera for me has not been made yet.

Luckily I don’t need a new body at this time, so I can analyze the the Canon 5D Mark II without much emotion.

Attractive to me:

• very high image quality
• great high-ISO performance
• no crop factor
• I already have lenses for it
• takes CF cards
• larger and brighter viewfinder than my Canon 30D

Not attractive to me:

• too many pixels
• lacks in-body image stabilization
• no improvement of the auto-focus
• body too large and heavy
• viewfinder still not as large and bright as in a mid-class film body

Maybe Pentax will have the answer to my needs — if and when they release a body with the 24 MP Sony chip. Although once again, that’s too many pixels.

With so many megapixels I’ll need more memory cards, a larger hard disk and much more backup space. It will take longer to transfer the images onto my computer, to generate thumbnails, open the files, save the files, make backups, etc. In fact I’ll probably need a new computer, and since Adobe does not add new cameras to old Photoshop versions, I’ll need a Photoshop upgrade too. No, no, I don’t need a new camera at this time!

Before you tell me that more megapixels means larger prints, consider this. After learning to sharpen images properly, I can produce excellent 30×45 cm (12×16″) prints out of 6 megapixels. That’s generally the image size from my Canon 30D after cropping a bit and getting to a 3:4 aspect ratio. I could probably even do a 40×50 print onto DIN A2+ paper (17×22″) if you don’t look at it under a loupe. That’s the largest paper size that my printer will print — so no sir, I don’t need no 24 stinkin’ megapixels.

Photographer’s Block

… as in “writer’s block”…  Have you experienced it?  How do I get out of mine?