Can I be a Professional and NOT have CS4?

[Ffred]

I almost never use a bitmap editor on my images. All my processing is done in spe******ed tools such as BibblePro (RAW photo development, commercial software) and digiKam (image management, OSS). Both have numerous dedicated tools such as spot healing / cropping, etc. and of course a wide selection of colour and exposure tweaking gadgets. They both work in managed 16bit colour spaces.

Very rarely do I have to actually retouch an image, mostly removing an annoying detail with a stamp-like tool. Any decent bitmap editor can do that so there's no need for anything super-fancy (I use Krita or Gimp, both OSS).

When I have some printing done, I just set my images right for the printer's colour space. In most cases it'll end up on photographic paper anyway. There pretty much are no longer any reasons to ever bother with CMYK stuff in photography. Only people who actually are in the magazine fab business or industrial printing still care about that.

So in short, any bitmap editor will do. Unless you do a lot of compositing or actual image editing, it's a tool that's rarely needed anyway.