When it comes to Photoshop, I admit, I’m a complete fool. I know the absolute bare minimum – just enough to get by. I can take a sweet design by one of our talented creative guys here at iStudio and do what I need to do – which is basically creating a series of slice guides. Real simple stuff – nothing complicated.

I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop CS2 for almost three years now and life has been good. Sure, its a real pain copying slices over from one PSD to another (when we’re working on a bilingual site design), but there’s always ImageReady for doing that sort of stuff.

However, I was beginning to feel a bit lie a dinosaur. Everyone else on our creative team had long since upgrade to CS4, leaving me way behind in the dust. Jealousy, anger, the pursuit of happiness – all these feelings grew stronger. I wanted to be just like them. Happy and content with the latest and greatest software from Adobe.

This morning I upgrade to CS4 – Adobe Design Premium CS4 to be exact. I was impress by all the crap really useful applications that came with it – stuff I’ll never use in a million years use every day, no doubt.

I fired up Photoshop and to my dismay everything I had been comfortable with in CS2 had completely changed. What’s up with this boring steel gray interface anyways? No worries, I said, this is all something I’ll get used to in good time. I pressed the ‘K’ key on my keyboard. Nothing happened. I tried again – still nothing. Ok, so they changed the shortcut key – no biggie. I looked EVERYWHERE for the slicing tool and it was found nowhere. It wasn’t until later that I read that this feature had since been removed from Photoshop. If you wanted to do image slicing, Fireworks CS4 was going to be the tool of choice.

I could spend many hours griping about my experiences this morning with Fireworks, but I just don’t have the heart. Suffice to say, I hate this tool. It is nowhere as easy to use as Photoshop CS2 / ImageReady. I found even selecting text to copy it from Fireworks to another document was extremely annoying. Also, another stupid thing was when I saved the document I was working on (default format of PNG) it totally screwed up the layout when I re-opened it again within Fireworks. BLAH.

I just re-installed Photoshop CS2. Life is good again.