Which Photoshop is Right for Me?

[Peacefield]

I use PSE 4 and Canon's DPP. I'm pretty happy with this combo for most things. I'm beginning to do many more weddings, just purchased a new PC running Vista, and am thinking about investing in better software to both make my photos look better as well as my work more efficient. Here's what I want to be able to do better:
- Skin softening: Gaussian blur on another layer just doesn't give me a good enough look. Indeed, I don't even like PSE4's blur filters; I don't want to blur, I want to soften.
- Vignetting: Not happy with the control I feel I have now around the shape and look of my vignettes.
- Noise: I've always felt that DPP or PSE4 do an okay but not great job with noise.
- Simplify steps: It's frustrating to work through the number of clicks I have to just to do something simple like a vignette.

So here are my questions/options:
- Will upgrading to PSE7 get me any of what I'm looking for or not really?
- Do I need to step up to full PhotoShop? And if so, can I save a few dollars by purchasing the older CS3 off of eBay?
- I'm thinking of dropping the money on Portraiture and Noiseware no matter what I do with PS. Does it make sense to pick up these two and just stay with PSE4? This would get me some of what I'm looking for, but neither better vignetting nor simplified steps.

I'll spend what I need to, but obviously don't want to spend more than is necessary.

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

[ohenry]

Money aside, upgrading to full fledge Photoshop will open up new techniques and opportunities. Rather than saving a few bucks and going with CS3 from EBAY, which may be a problem with illegal software not recognized by Adobe for future upgrades, why not look into the current upgrade policies direct from Adobe? There have been, in the past, some really good upgrade paths from PSE to CS.

Additionally, CS4 is a much improved version of CS3 that is worth the jump. If you want to continue to use DPP for RAW that's fine, but only CS4 is capable of doing RAW with the latest cameras (Adobe discontinues upgrading RAW for older versions and newer cameras get lost in the dust -- a major issue for those of us that upgrade our camera body and rely on Adobe as our RAW processor -- although DNG is a good work around)

Noiseware is a great plugin for PS and, from what I have seen, Portraiture is as well. Why not buy the bundle rather than just 2? The bundle includes Noiseware, Portraiture, and Grain programs.

[digdug]

Just my two cents have you looked into Lightroom. Also you can get a trial version from Adobe to see it that warrents the upgrade.

[Gene McCullagh]

I'd also recommend you look into Lightroom. You can do a lot of what you want directly in LR non-destructively. Then you can send it out to PSE for tweaks if needed. If you use a stand-alone noise reduction package like Noise Ninja LR can round trip out to that as well. Although, you might be surprised by LR's noise and sharpening tools.

[Peacefield]

Thanks, everyone; I'm going to download a few samples and play.

[aram535]

Almost 80% of the my images used to go through ACR and roughly 60% of my images in Photoshop, very time consuming. Now that I have Lightroom and am comfortable with it, I can honestly way maybe 1 / 250 images goes to photoshop and these are something special that needs to be done. I highly doubt I'll continue to upgrading photoshop in the future.

[Peacefield]

Well, I think I've decided, and this is certainly not the decision that allows the most efficient workflow, but it gets me the end product that I want photographically and it's fairly low cost.

I think I'm going to stay PSE4. CS4 just wasn't offering me enough of what I was looking for. It's more efficient: the ability to make actions, more adjustments only a click away, etc., but it's slower, expensive, and would still probably require the plug-ins for a few more hundereds of dollars.

So I'm staying DPP, working much of the image in PSE4, will pick up Portraiture and either Noiseware or Noise Ninja, and will probably even jump over to Corel X sometimes as I continue to find their filters and effects much better than Photoshop's.

eeeesh, it just shouldn't be this hard, though. What I'm looking for isn't that great or even narrow and this space is pretty mature by now. For what Adobe charges, how can it not include some of these capabilities?