Photoshop CS4 and CS4 Extended

September 22, 2008 | Be the first to comment

Adobe has today announced the release of and as part of Adobe , and has been testing a Beta release. Here are our initial thoughts

The enhancements of Photoshop CS4 are two-fold. New content-aware scaling, smarter Smart Objects, non-destructive corrections through the Adjustments panel, a new tabbed GUI, and extended 3D support and tools makes up the workflow and direct editing enhancements. Under the hood, though, is where Photoshop CS4 has really improved.

It can now make use of 64-bit processing on Windows, and harness the GPU power of OpenGL 2.0 and ShaderModel 3.0, enhancing Photoshop CS4 Extended's 3D editing capabilities.

Photoshop CS4 Extended also supports direct painting, editing and rendering of 3D models and formats including OBJ, Collada and U3D formats.

On the Mac platform, 16-bit printing is fully supported, as well as the ability to preview out-of-gamut colours.

The added RAM performance of a 64-bit environment makes editing large, multi-layered PSD's easy - something Photoshop Principal Product Manager John Nack has been demonstrating by sliding a 2GB, 442MP Photoshop PSD about the new tabbed interface with ease.

Improved performance is none more obvious than while utilizing Photoshop CS4's new Rotate View tool, which allows you to rotate your canvas as you would a sketchbook.

Content-aware scaling was touted at last year's Siggraph conference and has made it into Photoshop CS4's release. The new tool analyses an image and allows you to resize its dimensions without disfiguring key elements such as buildings or people.

Further improvements come in the form of Photoshop CS4's extended enhanced motion graphics support, allowing you to now import 3D and motion layers directly from Photoshop CS4 into After Effects CS4.

You can read our first impressions of other elements of Creative Suite 4, including Illustrator CS4, InDesign CS4 and Flash CS4 here.

A full, in-depth review and analysis of Photoshop CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended and the rest of Creative Suite 4 will be in November's Computer Arts magazine, issue 155 - on sale October 23.

What's new in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended?