Wrd, thank god for student discount.

 

I'm definitely on it. Gonna use my cousin's student discount

 

Camera Raw, because it is so closely tied in with Photoshop, does depend on upgrades to Photoshop. When CS3 came out, support for the previous version of Raw stopped and new cameras were not supported.

This is one of the advantages of Lightroom. If you don't want to be forced to keep your Photoshop versions up-to-date, you can go with Lightroom (which is cheaper to update) and still be able to process raw files from the latest cameras.

I'm still on CS2, but I'm thinking that content-aware scaling is going to make me upgrade to CS4. The problem is that I have the full CS suite, so we're not just talking a Photoshop upgrade.