Eh... I'm not a techy or anything, but I had the trial of photoshop cs, then got the full photoshop 7 and don't see much of any difference, though CS has extra goodies like panarama for example. I think all plugins, brushes, etc that could be used in earlier photoshop versions can be used in the newest version... Though, I did have photoshop 6 for a little while and none of the custom brushes and such I downloaded made with PSP 7 and CS, worked on PSP 6... Hope this helped some... Lady Sythe