Hi there! I'm looking pretty heavily at the Photoshop 7.0 upgrade and noticed a few new features which may be helpful for post processing of renders. The healing brush seems like it would be a nice tool to repair renders where you have over bent a joint, or to repair texturing problems. And the Texture maker seems like it would be good for creating textures for Poser. Has anyone used these new features and if so how well do they work? Thanks J.B. Settle

the healing brush is overrated, it doesnt work as well as i had expected it to... the natural media brushes are nice if you dont have painter or another program like it. theyre not quite up to painter's standards, but theyre a nice addition. the new interface is nice and sharp, but its clunky for someone used to ps 6 or earlier. i spent so much time looking for things that i am used to be in a certain place its not funny (such as the brush dynamics like fade, taper, etc). they did stupid things like rename Adjust to 'Adjustments'... i really dont know what purpose this serves other than to slow me down, when im used to clickin on 'adjust' for the last 4 years and they change it to 'adjustments' it slows me down for the time it takes to do a double take. i know it sounds silly, but theyve done so many stupid small changes like that that the entire program seems alien to me. my best recommendation would be to wait until one of your friends or the office gets a copy of it, then sit down and play with it for an hour. cheers, -gabriel

I have been extremely happy with the upgrade. Granted, I am far from full time Phototshop artist others are but the new features are incredibly useful to me... and many things work faster or more intuitively for me. As with so many Photoshop upgrades, there will be a lot of mixed feelings - there always is when something changes that is this widely and commonly used. it's like changing the shape of someones paintbrush. Even if the new shape is "better" it isn't what their used to :)

I've been putting up with these annoying "improvements" in Phsop since version 2.5. It's true, they often move things and/or rename or change things for no apparant reason. But I've never been disappointed in an upgrade because they always include many real improvements. Although I just got 7 and haven't tried it yet. I think they just make the meaningless, pain-in-the-butt changes so they can up the numder of "improvements" they advertise.

From which version can you update to the actual photoshop version? I have a 4.0 here and wondering if an Update still is possible...

Here's what the box says "...a licensed user of Adobe Photoshop 6.0 or earlier. This is not an upgrade for Adobe Photoshop LE..." So, I guess, any earlier full version of Photoshop.

Sounds good. V4 is pretty outdated.