Review: Adobe Photoshop CS4 and CS4 Extended

Streamlined, OpenGL-enabled interface offers easier access to tools

Adobe made some pretty serious changes in Photoshop CS4, especially in the workspace. And while some of them, like the new Application Frame, will take some getting used to (and are optional), they’re changes that are long overdue. Each new version has piled new tools on top of old, and important bits and pieces were getting lost in the shuffle. In fact, you’re liable to see several “new” tools in Photoshop CS4 that aren’t really new at all (like the Hand and Zoom tools); they’ve merely clawed their way back to the surface after being buried. As a result, a few tools have been cut (stay tuned to find out which ones).

There’s no shortage of new features either. Photoshop CS4 takes advantage of OpenGL—a hardware and software engine for drawing graphics faster and more efficiently—to render some very slick and useful screen effects like Rotate View, pixel tossing (called Flick Panning), dynamic brush resizing, and more. Also making its first, tentative steps in CS4 is a new technology called seam carving, the engine behind the new Content-Aware Scaling tool that intelligently resizes your images so your focal point remains unchanged. Along with it comes a real 3-D engine, new Masks and Adjustments panels, selective editing in Camera Raw, and more. What’s missing in this release, however, is 64-bit compatibility—the means by which Photoshop can handle files greater than 4GB in size. Windows Vista 64-bit got it, so why not the Mac? Read on to find out why.

by Lesa Snider King, read the full article here

Visit the Adobe web site for more info on Photoshop CS4.