Adobe's just announced a new version of their venerable graphics app, Photoshop. And what can I say - I'm not excited. Is it just me, or does it seem like they do this as a way of printing money, rather than for our good?

Don't get me wrong. I've been using Photoshop since version 2 and am a big fan of the program. It's just that I could do everything I really needed to do to a photo with version 7. Sure, there have been some nice features and improvements over the years, but the key tools I use have been around for a while now. Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation. Combined with Layers, I can do everything I need to. Of course, I get my joy out of photography from seeing and capturing the image, not from turning it into art on the computer. Too many pictures that come out of Photoshop are just bad photos that have been dressed up with software. To borrow a phrase heard a lot lately, if you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig.

So I still use Photoshop, but it's not my only photo imaging software anymore. I also use Nikon's Capture NX 2 and Adobe's Lightroom. Capture lets me work faster on individual images and Lightroom is a better fast batch processing tool. I save Photoshop for when I need to do things like merge multiple layers or add type - in other words, graphics work. And my way of combating upgrade fees is to usually upgrade every other version. Right now I'm running Photoshop CS3 on my Windows Vista machines and CS2 on my Macs. So with this upgrade I'll do the Macs, and wait for the next version to do the rest.

I already spend enough money on computer hardware and software, and would rather put those extra dollars into photo gear when I can. After all, that's what I make pictures with, not computers.