The OpenGL acceleration also shines in the new 3D commands found in Photoshop Extended, which lets you load 3D objects into the app, paint on them, and render the results using a decent ray-trace renderer built right in. There’s also a selection of built-in 3D shapes—cylinders, cubes, spheres, and even a soda can and wine bottle. You can instantly wrap your flat 2D image around a 3D shape and change the lighting, camera angle, and a wide range of advanced rendering parameters that might make the typical pixel artist dizzy, but which will delight 3D geeks. Grayscale images can be turned into wild 3D shapes (Google John Knoll and CyberMesh to get an idea of what this looks like) and exported for use in other 3D animation software. We enjoyed taking a 2D image layer and creating a 3D “postcard” from it, by spinning the image around a 3D axis—useful for creating foreshortening effects that would otherwise take more work using the standard Perspective transform tool.

With the right video hardware, you can rotate the entire working canvas, a dream come true for Wacom tablet users.

While all this three-dimensional editing is certainly cool, the simple fact is that experienced 3D artists are probably already using a dedicated 3D modeling and painting program such as Maxon’s powerful BodyPaint 3D, a professional tool with a mature toolset and finely tuned texture-painting abilities. Photoshop CS4 puts some cool stuff out there, but these 3D features need to be fleshed out before they can become anything other than nifty toys for dabblers.

If your Mac lacks the required OpenGL hardware, some of the 3D functionality can still be accomplished, but expect a major performance hit. For example, we found the process of spinning a 10-megapixel image on an axis to be glacially slow without OpenGL acceleration. What stumps us about this is that After Effects has had a similar ability for years, and it works smoothly on machines without high-end video capabilities.

All Together Now

Built in to Photoshop CS4, Kuler is a nifty tool for creating harmonious color sets.

You don’t need us to tell you that we’re deeply immersed in the Internet era. Photoshop CS4 adds some new, highly tempting on-ramps to the info superhighway. There are some cool extensions that connect Photoshop to Adobe’s website, for example. And the très cool Kuler technology is also built into Photoshop CS4. Emerging from Adobe’s labs last year, Kuler lets anyone create compelling custom sets of colors and share them with the Adobe-user community. Kuler also incorporates “color harmony” intelligence that morphs a base color into visually pleasing, multicolor palettes that are extremely handy for real-world design work. If you’re connected to the Net, you can search the Adobe database of color sets and even enter keywords such as “autumn” or “psychedelic.”Finally, you can easily copy any Kuler color set to your local swatches panel for offline use.

If you want to have a Photoshop party, use the ConnectNow feature to share your local Photoshop screen activity with a pair of remote viewers, along with an accompanying audio or video feed, all handled through Adobe’s servers. All your remote friends need is Web access and a browser. This is exactly what graphics pros need for client reviews and one-on-one remote teaching or tech support.

The Devil's in The Details

You can now see where the effects of the Clone tool will appear before you paint, as with a live brush preview.

There are all sorts of nifty new tweaks in Photoshop CS4, in addition to the standout improvements we’ve covered here. There are a lot of small touches that add up to a pleasing overall picture. Have you ever wanted to delete a layer just by selecting it and pressing Delete? You finally can in CS4.

If you have a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air with a gesture-equipped touchpad, you’ll be delighted to discover that Photoshop CS4 supports the two-finger pinch for scaling images as well as using gestures to rotate and zoom.

The Vibrance color-correction control appeared a version or two ago in Camera Raw, and it’s a much more effective way to add color intensity than the venerable Hue/Saturation command. It’s implemented inside of CS4 as an adjustment layer, and you’ll quickly learn to rely on it for adding punch and presence to color objects in a scene, without creating color artifacts in uniform backgrounds.
Serious image retouchers will experience love at first sight when they lay eyes on the new live preview of the Clone Stamp and Healing brush. Support for 16-bit printing adds rich details to black-and-white printing on art paper and makes color images pop on decent color photo printers.

So What's Not to Like? 

One of the things Mac users find irksome is the fact that Photoshop CS4 is not a 64-bit application, meaning that the maximum amount of RAM that the software can make use of is 3GB. If you’re a Web designer or a hobbyist digital photographer, this won’t be a make-or-break issue, but for those who work with very large images with many adjustment layers, this might be the reason you decide not to go for Photoshop CS4. Given that Adobe’s Lightroom is a 64-bit application, it’s surprising that Photoshop CS4 is not, and it’s especially frustrating since the Windows version is a true 64-bit app.

The Bottom Line 

Should you upgrade to Photoshop CS4? It depends on how you use the app and your particular area of professional expertise. Anyone with a point-and-shoot camera, Mac mini, or casual interest in imaging is already using Photoshop Elements and totally happy with it’s many capabilities. There’s nothing for you to see here, so kindly move along.

Professional photographers will absolutely want to consider making the move to CS4, especially because some of the better parts of Lightroom are built right in, and once you’ve used Context Aware Scaling in the right setting, you’ll be hooked.

Anyone who makes heavy use of layer masks will be blown away by the new masking tricks, which are true innovations and worth every penny. Professional designers should probably upgrade, too, especially if they plan to upgrade the entire Adobe graphics suite, all variations of which include Photoshop. This might not be the most radical Photoshop update ever, but as we adjusted to it over the last several weeks, we grew to love the overall picture.

A Bridge Over Digital Water

The most subtle improvement in Bridge—the ability to view the path of the current directory—is a welcome addition.

Over the years, Adobe has taken Bridge from a simplistic image browser to a capable digital media-management system. In CS4, Bridge has some cool new additions that will make your life easier. Our favorite is the Review command, which takes the selected images (or all images in the current folder, if none are selected) and puts them in a pseudo 3D turnstile, a great way to review images with clients or creative partners. You can rate images in the Review interface, as well as create custom Collections of images, which is very useful for cataloging and organizing large image libraries.

The Review command in Bridge CS4 gives you a sweet way to scroll through lots of images.

If you have a collection of pictures that you’d like to turn into a set of Web catalog pages, Bridge now includes all of the Web-creation goodies in Lightroom, resulting in professional HTML—or Flash—files ready to be uploaded to your Web server.

And in the “Small Details Loom Large” category, the simple addition of a visual folder path in the main Bridge window is a minor tweak that makes us smile every time we see it. No more wondering where we are in the sea of folders that is our Mac’s hard drive.

See Content-Aware Scaling in Action!

There are several features in Photoshop CS4 that are better demonstrated live, onscreen than with a static printed screen shot. Content-Aware Scaling (see “Better Scaling and Stitching,”) is one of those features. To see this and other cool new features in Photoshop CS4 demo’d “live,” check out the exclusive screencasts on our website at www.maclife.com/pscs4_screencasts.