I ordered CS5 but got CS5 extended instead, so thanks to the supplier for this. I have since been told this is what happens now, as they are both selling at the same price, so why not give out the extended version instead. I will never use the extended aspect of the software, but a nice touch none the less, so thanks again.
Over £600 for a software package is a big bill to swallow and a large chunk of money, but it is the industry standard and quite simply cannot be beat - if you are serious about imaging in what ever form, then there are no ifs or buts, you need this software.
However there are at least two major bugs I have found in this version, after using it for only a few days (the PC version), that I now find I have no other choice than to use a less than acceptable work around:
Major bug 1 - with the wizzy Open GL graphics mode set on by default if you have a supported graphics card - which all modern PC's do, then you can do all sorts of wonderful things, such as flick the image on screen from side to side and up and down, or load up a virtual colour wheel, or see the image zoom in and out smoothly on screen like a Mac, or even use a zoom loupe to get straight into close up views of part of the image you wish to inspect at 100% detail, which would be great, except...
When using the highly vaunted Open GL aspect of CS5 with my brand new i7 Dell PC, with 22 inch screen, I find the full screen image review mode (Ctrl, 0) after tapping F several times to also get the black backdrop, now fills the screen with a very soft and blurry preview image. Very disconcerting, I thought my eyes were on the blink or my camera focusing was off, but I knew the image was crisp, as I'd already worked on the image before. So I experimented and found that if I zoomed in once more with Ctrl +, or zoomed out once with Ctrl -, the screen showed me a crisp image, but then it was either too big to fit on the screen or showing me a smaller image that did not use all the screen real estate (as our American cousins call it). But at least I was glad it wasn't my eyes or my camera work. So it seems the default full screen setting with Ctrl 0 under Open GL, which I would want to use all the time, falls between two crisp image preview presets and instead presents you with an image that is blurred enough to make you think you have taken a really bad shot - I know the image on screen is always going to be an on-the-fly interpolated version of the actual image for viewing purposes, but even so, every other version of PS I have used over the past 14 years has worked fine in this respect and as I am using a bog standard screen at a bog standard size and resolution, then why was it doing this to me now?
What I discovered I had to do to overcome this major problem, is to turn off Open GL. Now Ctrl 0 fits the image to full screen size and displays a nice crisp image. So with one (albeit major) problem, this means that all the new and wizzy graphics animation tricks have gone straight out of the window in one fell swoop. What a basic error to make and why have they done this?
Major bug 2 - Without the Open GL aspect working which I now find I am forced to use, again when I go into full screen mode and pressing the F key until you get to full screen review mode with a black background, which again worked perfectly on every other version of PS I have used previously that did not support Open GL, now does display the image crisply, but with a light blue eye distracting border all around the edge of the screen, that you simply cannot get rid of, except of course if you turn Open GL back on again, which gets me back to the totally useless full screen blurred image mode. I suppose the blue border could be a Win 7 issue, but you would think they might have thought to test these two industry standard programs together and checked for and corrected any compatibility issues prior to release.
I have tried to get round this in other ways such as setting the display resolution in PS to the same as the image pixel resolution by measuring the screen width and dividing that measurement by the pixel display settings, or changing the way Win 7 displays screen resolution at various sizes, but nothing works - it's either blurry full screen images with Open GL and all the razzamataz, or a horrible light blue border and no razzamataz without Open GL.
So there you have it, a fantastic bit of software with more bells and whistles than you will ever need, that fails at the most fundamental level, by not letting you look at an image in full screen mode without the image either being blurry or having a distracting light blue border around it.
Now do not get me wrong, I am not actually unhappy with this software, it is what I need and also teach and use on a daily basis, but this blurred image problem is annoying and very disappointing, because I think this a result of Adobe having seriously taken their eye off the ball here and spent too much time on the Open GL trickery, instead of continuing to develop and innovate solid image manipulation algorithms for professionals.
So yes buy it by all means, but you may also find that you need to turn off all the 'nice' wizzy stuff that you may have bought it for in the first place, that is of course if you want to see crisp images in full screen mode, which surely we all want to do and should be the single most fundamental operation of this very expensive piece of software.