The New Photoshop CS6

The new Photoshop CS6 is now coming out in the next two weeks, I just had a look at the Beta top 5 features and there’s not really any different to cs5 And cs3?
So here is the new features
1. New RAW edit
2. Some new filters,
3. A Spot Healing Brush had content aware and a bit better.
4. New HDR?
5. Hair separation and selection
I don’t think this is very much for what it’s going to cost?

I've been using the beta now for a few months and the only new features are mentioned above. The is a new tilt shift blur filter. I have found the spot healing brush to be better. The whole user interface looks, to me, to be better. Its very dark and err, cool looking?
Is it a lot better than Cs5? No I dont think so.

Can't see the point. Lightroom and Nik Software plugins are more than enough for 99.9999% of photography purposes.

I always miss a version out with PS/LR (ie CS3 to CS5), so when I upgrade I get quite a few extra features for my money.
Apparently Adobe have changed the rules so that in future to can only upgrade from the previous version or pay full price again, which is not good.

Most of us don't need to upgrade at all. It's only recently that we moved from CS2 to CS5, but that was more to do with needing some features for a job than anything else.

I was offered a teaching post where they were still using CS2, but that's more than adequate for most things. It's certainly fine for teaching basic Photoshop skills.

I think CS5 will do us fine for quite a while yet. Having said that, I prefer it to CS2, but there's a difference between need and just some things being quite nice to have.

I think you will be able to upgrade from the previous dot release also – so you could go from CS 5.0 or CS 5.5 to CS6. There was a lot of unhappiness in the Adobe community when they changed to upgrade policy.
I still plan to upgrade every two years so I will wait to go from CS5.5 to CS6.5. But anyone who wants to stay current but is still on CS4 or older will have to think of upgrading soon to avoid the expense of having to go for the full version rather than the upgrade when CS6 is released (especially those with creative suite licences)

On the Adobe forums there appears to be a lot of interest in the new version of ACR which apparently is a big improvement over ACR6.6, from what people have reported about the beta release of ACR6.7

The Adobe US online-store has on offer of a free upgrade to CS6 for anyone upgrading to CS5.5 before May 6, as usual no sign of a similar offer on the UK site

Update:
It appears the free CS6 upgrade is available in the UK, just not very well signposted on the website.

It's always been the case that PhotoShop upgrades provide only incremental improvements for a lot of money. I can't think of any update that was ever essential.

Dead right.

I've been trying the beta version of cs6 and am very impressed, the new camera raw seems significantly better than cs4 that I currently use. I like the interface changes, and the context aware healing brush and replacement tools do a very good job. I just bought the upgrade version of cs5 from amazon for £152, to get the free upgrade to cs6 when its released. The way I see it, yes its an expensive outlay but I probably won't upgrade again for 3-4 years, that equates to a few pounds a month, well worth it imo. I'm a software engineer and use some very expensive software products (paid for by work fortunately) Photoshop is far better imo so is actually not bad value.

Is it issue with me or in general, but i have installed photoshop cs6 beta two times on my macbook pro and both times the images tend to be over sharpened, without me sharping them?
They just look very bad!
The new content aware is pretty impressive, but if the images becomes with so bad quality due to over sharpening...
I hope this is just beta issue or just on my machine.

I'm still using CS3 and Lightroom 1.4...

Personally I struggle to properly be able to visualise differences like this. My eye mustnt be as keen. Is it very noticeable?

Very big difference... the quality of the output with 100% same settings is VERY POOR.
Even without applying unsharp mask the resized photo looks over sharpened. If you resize 16mp pic to 1000px on the long side and then apply 0.5px 70% unsharp mask in cs6 it looks like you applied 1.5px 150% in CS5. If you know what I mean. The fine detail is lost and looks like crap.
So both times PS CS6 lasted like 2 hours on my machine and went to trash.
Hope they fix it.

Photo club? How many of you are there?

Not sure what you're asking here as in the quote given there is no mention of a photo club?