Adobe Photoshop CS4

One of the things I first noticed was the change in the adjustment layers. Every time you add an adjustment layer, there opens a corresponding palette above the layers palette. This is great. Now you can fine tune the adjustment layers without opening a new window every time. You can fly through all the adjustments and make tweaks to each one. Another great aspect is the tabbed window interface. This is awesome, if you like to have multiple documents open at the same time. It is so much easier to find the document that you need to work on. The other aspect of the tabbed document interface is that you can now open multiple documents side by side. This is great for easily comparing documents with out having to move one document off of another. You can easily get the most screen real-estate for each of the documents with very little effort.

 

I was a little upset that I could not take advantage of the advanced navigation features in CS4. My computer has a graphics card that supports OpenGL, but I had to turn off that feature in order to get my images to show up correctly. When I had the feature turned on, my images would show up missing chunks or sliced up with lines through them.

 

There are some dramatic changes to the toning tools. I think it makes them much more useful. In the past I was always hesitant to use the dodge and burn tools because it was always hard to get images to look right. The tool now is much more forgiving and allows you “paint” over an image and change the tone. I think this might be one of the best improvements to Photoshop.

 

A small change, that just makes sense, is the ability to preview what you are painting with when you use the clone tool. This seems especially helpful with the heal tool. Now there is no more guessing what background and textures are going to be used when you clone something.

 

One of the coolest features is the content aware scaling. Basically you can squeeze an image and Photoshop will keep all the important parts of the photograph undistorted. Somehow Photoshop knows what the important parts of the are and just scales the background. It does not work perfectly every time, but there are ways to protect certain parts of the image if you do not want them affected. I think this is an amazing feature. I am not sure how often I will use it, but it is nice to know it is there if I need it.

 

Some of the things I will have to get used to are the feature that they have taken away. They have not removed them completely but rather moved them to Adobe Bridge. Most notably these features are under the Automate command such as Contact sheet, Web Gallery and Picture Package. By moving them to Bridge they have much more functionality. Contact sheet is the function I use most often and I think it will be much easier to use now. I can now preview the document and choose any font I want for labeling my photos on the contact sheet. Also, the contact sheet is exported as a multipage pdf if it is more than one page. This is a huge time saver.

Over all Photoshop CS4 is a solid upgrade. It has some really strong workflow improvements as well as some of the extra fun things that we all like to see in a new version. It is not a must have upgrade, but is definitely worth it.