What are some new features that it brings to the table? And is it worth updating to?

Well I certainly will not speak for others, but IMO the price is worth it.

My favorites in the new features category are...

Image Browser: You can see thumbnails of your images in any folder you select. To me this is a big time saver, and eliminates the need for a separate program to do this.

Level Adjustment Enhancement: With photographs the first thing I do is adjust the levels. The new features in this make color correction a snap at the same time you are doing your levels. Great feature if you need to edit a good deal of photos, or just want better control.

Healing Brush: They bill this as a clone tool on steriods, and it truly is.

New Brush Features: Still not Up to Painter, but a lot better. And you can combine two brushes at a time.

Bottom line is that the new features are all good. As to the price... I think you get a lot more with this upgrade than spending as much on plugin filters. If you are using a version earlier than PS 6 I would say go for it without question.

I've been "playing" with my new Photoshop7 for a week now and I too love ALL of the above features that Alpha mentioned. The new interface took a little bit of getting use to, but the learning curve has been on the rolling hill rather than steep upgrade side. One feature I also like is the spell-check. (I had to take a quick stroll through the "Online Help to figure out where it was located.) As to is it worth the price? Hmmmm that is a loaded Q. I bought 5.5 the day 6.0 came out, and Adobe was kind enough to give me a wonderful price break on 6.0. Photoshop 6.0 was an excellent version, and to be honest if not for the healing brush I would most likely have skipped version 7. With that said however, I would recommend 7 to anyone who is working with photo retouching. The healing brush alone is a great feature!

I've been diving into "7" for about a "week-an-a-half" now and i think it's been worth the upgrade price. The choice of "upgrade-or-not" breaks down to what it is that you use Photoshop for... I know it became more expensive to upgrade for me when Adobe stop supporting Win95 and made me "have" to upgrade my OS in order to upgrade Photoshop. This is just one of the factors that upgrades impact... Both Alpha and Lady have pointed out the new feature sets that make it worth it for them. What are some of the things you use PS for (or would like to use it for...)??

Can you use the photoshop 6 brushes that i downloaded, and put them in 7?

Yes, you can use Photoshop 6 brushes in Photoshop 7. You can even better your Photoshop 6 brushes better using new brush dynamics. I'm partial to color dynamics using foreground and background colors. You can do hair, fur, grass etc. a lot better painting with 2 colors.

Dreamer101, i love that feature. i know some people feel there are to many parameters but i think they "pumped" it up great.