In answer to the question "Should I upgrade?" let me offer this quick rundown of some of the new features and some of the drawbacks that I have seen mentioned in various forums:

  1. Great new photo correction filters built in.
     Autocolor correction. Very easy to take the blue and red caste from pictures that aren't quite on in color.
     Autocontrast adjustment. Quick and easy to fix over and under exposure.
     Clarify is amazing.....it can really spiff up a pic that seems a little flat.
     Manual corrections for the above are available and powerful but take a little playing to get just what you want.

  2. New Style/Color Palette is both good and bad. It is powerful. You can stroke and fill with any color/gradient/pattern that you choose (text and shapes). Patterns can be rotated to any angle just as the gradients were in 6. The “bad“ of this is it does take some getting used to. It is not automatic. You also can no longer change colors within a single line of text in the text entry window. This can be overcome by creating text as vectors and then converting to individual shapes.

  3. I don't use the retouch tools a lot but I have seen some complaints about the changes made to them.....mostly the lack of the setting of build up brush for many of the retouch methods. JASC says that it's not checkable because it is the default and the nature of the tool doesn't really support removing that. That answer didn't satisfy most of the users who were complaining.
  4 Custom brushes can now be resized. And you can actually paint with patterns and textures.

  5. You can now save workspaces including all the toolbars (of which there are 4 added bars). This means if you get a corruption of the registry and have to do a reset you don't have to spend the time redoing the customizations you have made to your toolbar. To use this you must save at least one workspace after you get things set up as you like them.

  6. There are 2 new lighting filters that seem to have some awesome possibilities. One is a sunburst which is similar to a lens flare; that gets good and bad reviews. I like it's effect but folks looking for a lens flare filter don't seem too happy with it. The other lighting filter lets you place 1 to 5 lights on your image and set their intensity etc.

  7. You can now open some vector images such as .wmf files into PSP7 as a vector image. This means a cleaner resize of clipart you have in .wmf format. This is pretty processor and memory intensive and works best on powerful systems.

  8. You can now set line/stroke styles to include end arrows, dotted lines, dashed lines, etc.

There is more that I'm missing I'm sure. I think the upgrade price of $40 that I paid was well worth it. It works fine installed in addition to PSP6 and it is actually legal in the upgrade licensing agreement this time. The move from 6 to 7 does take some getting used to. The changes to the color/style palette in regards to stroke and fill are rather daunting at first, but once you do you really enjoy the options they give you.