thanks

It can now do 3D work, which I wouldn’t use it for beacuse, clearly, it’s been optimised for the 2D environment. So it would never give you the ease and flexibility of Maya, 3DS Max, etc. If you want to do 3D work, do it in a dedicated 3D environment and just render the result to an image file (2D) which you then edit using Photoshop.

It seems as if photoshop has been pretty good for some time and Adobe’s failing about now, just trying to pack in features that don’t really belong there but that get the consumers excited and allows it to bundle in with the latest CS upgrade number.

I would much rather have the emphasis on the 2D side, with an aspiration to making it as easy to use as an artist with a (real world) sheet of paper and a (real world) stick of charcoal.

The rotate feature is important in this regard, and is, as you say, long overdue.

Check out out 2-D environments, like the painter effects in Corel Painter Essentials. Photoshop’s art history brush doesn’t come close.

The Content-Aware Scaling is quite new; I haven’t seen that elsewhere, and depending on how good a job it does, would save me a lot of cloning time.

So what I’m saying in my long-winded way is that there’s plenty to grow into in a 2-D environment without unnecessarily trying to grow 3D too.

The other features are cool though. It might be worth upgrading.

my pc is struggling to run cs2 never mind 3 or 4

What’s the use of rotating the canvas? The adjustment-panels seem to speed up my workflow only about a second (one more click). Content-Aware Scaling — for some people it’s nice but in general, I don’t need it when designing websites. GPU/64bit-powered filters? I don’t use that much filters when creating shapes/layouts. The 3D-options are quite nice but the 3D-features of CS3 should also do it.
The upgrade fee is quite to high I think. What’s the fresh “brilliant” thing of CS4? With CS3, Adobe has created something MORE brilliant I think.