Users can rate them (on the Web only, not from within Photoshop), and you can sort the themes in the palette based on their popularity, newness, or randomness. They’re hosted online, and you can create your own themes and upload them to Adobe’s online repository. Kuler (see the gallery above) appears as a palette with many choices of “color themes”–that is, color sets that are supposed to go together. It works very well, but you do have to set up your shots this way, most likely by using a tripod and a timed release.Īnd what would a refreshed Adobe app be without some sort of new online component? Photoshop provides access to Kuler, a component that other Creative Suite applications can draw on, too.
If you decide you don’t like the effect, you can simply trash it, and your base image is unaffected.Ī new depth-of-field tool lets you combine multiples of the same image but in varying focus depths the software attempts to make everything in the shot in focus. If you adjust levels, for example, a levels layer appears in your layers palette instead of toggling a preview of your work in the levels dialog box, you can turn the layer on and off. But its role is far more important than just offering convenience: Effects initiated through this palette apply as adjustment layers, so any edits you make are nondestructive to the original image. The feature doesn’t always work perfectly–I found that expanding the canvas size caused tiling of the background elements–but it’s still an awesome tool to have.Ī new adjustments palette (see the image in the gallery above) contains many often-used photo enhancements that you’d usually have to dig into a menu for. In the example I’ve provided (see the images in the gallery above), resizing with the traditional method would have made the people in the foreground unrealistically skinny with context-aware scaling, the vinyl character in the back shrank, but the people remained the same size. Usually when you rescale an image, all elements in the image resize proportionally–and in the process, some elements warp or squash when they shouldn’t.
The most gee-whiz update is the new context-sensitive scaling, which allows you to resize pictures while retaining foreground objects’ scale. Of course, the added under-the-hood elements aren’t the only updates in Photoshop CS4. I got to watch a dialog box for a coffee-break-length period when I asked Photoshop to apply a simple monochrome gradient to my 5.6GB file. And even a system with lots of RAM won’t be able to avoid reading and writing data to your hard disk–a process that still proves time-consuming. Running the 64-bit version will provide little performance benefit other than the ability to address more RAM.
For people who do work on very large images, it’s probably more cost-effective to buy more RAM for your PC than to buy large RAID systems, and Photoshop will probably perform better. Adobe says that Photoshop keeps its editing history in RAM for as long as possible, too, so even if you’re working with smaller images but making lots of edits to them, allocating more RAM will help you in that situation as well.
Obviously, most people don’t need that sort of capability, but many professional photographers shoot with large- or medium-format cameras with digital backs that can capture nearly 40 megapixels or even higher, and they often create much larger compositions. In the 64-bit version, I was able to create and work with an image of 45,000 pixels by 45,000 pixels, for a total of a little over 2000 megapixels and a 5.6GB file size. The amounts will vary depending on your system, especially your graphics card.
I was able to set the 64-bit version to take up 6879MB of RAM, and to set the 32-bit version to consume 3185MB of RAM. Photoshop requires that you manually allocate a specific amount of RAM to it, rather than its acquiring the RAM on the fly.
I tested betas of both the 32- and 64-bit versions of Photoshop CS4 by installing them on a workstation with dual Intel Xeon CPUs, running Windows Vista 64-bit and 8GB of RAM. With the shrinking amount of RAM available to modern PCs (due to a 4GB limit on 32-bit Windows versions and those operating systems’ increasing hunger for RAM), that’s a significant update. The 64-bit edition will allow PCs with lots of RAM to work on very large images with less hard-disk swapping (ideally, no swapping at all), thus speeding up operations.
Adobe’s new Photoshop CS4 packs a ton of fresh features and an updated interface, which alone make it a worthy upgrade for existing users.īut the big news is that Photoshop now comes in both 32- and 64-bit Windows Vista versions.