A bit confused

[Shawj]

I currently have all CS versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, etc. I'm in dire need of an upgrade but have limited money.

Two questions:

1). I have the educational version of CS. I've heard that this means I can't simply "upgrade" to CS4. Is that true?

2). (Assuming #1 is correct) What is the difference here? On the Adobe Website I can get the CS4 Design Premium for $1,799. However, if I go to the "CS4 for Educational" page, it says CS4 Design Premium is $599. It doesn't say upgrade by it, either. Why is one so much more cheaper? Or is it just an upgrade and doesn't state it?

Thanks so much!

[urstwile]

Educational versions are always significantly cheaper than professional versions. It's how they hook you into the warm cozy family that is Adobe. :)

Do you still qualify for the educational discount?

[Shawj]

Educational versions are always significantly cheaper than professional versions. It's how they hook you into the warm cozy family that is Adobe. :)

Do you still qualify for the educational discount?

Well, I'm not sure. I'm currently a sophomore at my University. Does that make me qualified?

[urstwile]

Sounds like it does.

[Shawj]

Sounds like it does.

Cool, thanks for the help!

[Tea]

I've bought some of the education versions of software here as well:

http://journeyed.com/home.asp

[PrintDriver]

academicsuperstore.com is a good one too.

[Shawj]

So, what would you do if you were in my position?

I need to upgrade my software; I'm currently running CS. My school uses CS3 and does not know yet if they will upgrade to CS4 anytime soon.

If I upgrade to CS4, from what I understand, I won't be able to open my CS4 projects on CS3 (maybe that's wrong?). If that's the case, I need to be able to take documents from school and work on them at home, vise versa.

I don't know if I should upgrade to CS4 with the risk of not being able to open my projects at school, or just upgrade to CS3. But, I feel that if I only upgrade to CS3 then I'll be "behind" the software. But is CS4 that much better than CS3.

As you can tell, I'm pretty confused. :) Any opinions?

[budafist]

If you get CS4 for use at home, you just need to save your CS4 files as inx files so that you can open and work on them at school. CS4 will open CS3 files but CS3 files can only open the inx files.

[urstwile]

I don't even think you can upgrade to CS3 anymore, at least not via Adobe's site.

And just to clarify Buda's post a bit:

With InDesign, you can save your file as .inx and open it in CS3, provided the right stuff is installed on the CS3 versions at your school (CS required a patch to open .inx files from CS2, but CS2 doesn't appear to need anything extra to open CS3 files. Hopefully that's true for CS4 to CS3 as well).

For Photoshop, generally, you can open PSD's from later versions in earlier versions, you just might lose certain things that are specific to the version of Photoshop the file was created in.

With Illustrator, you can save the file down to the CS3 version for school. Again, same deal applies in terms of any special effects that are available in CS4 not being able to be used in CS3.

[artgem1984]

With regard to the InDesign bit - seems to open just fine using the .inx from CS4>CS3, I've had to use it @work