While the 3D Postcard feature adds new dimensions to layers, is it worth $349 to upgrade?
Photoshop is the Big Kahuna of image editing, and while other companies have tried to cook up viable competitors, no one has been able to unseat the industry-leading application. CS4 is an update that offers some nifty new additions, but many might find the upgrade decision to be a little less than straightforward.
The very first thing you’ll notice in Photoshop CS4 is the revised window interface, which much more closely mirrors the Windows way—a single floating application window with tabs for open documents. While Mac users might initially balk at this new reality, we found it hard to go back to the old way after just a few weeks of using CS4, and it’s especially convenient if you tend to keep multiple documents open at a time. Along these same lines, the nonmodal color corrections and masking palettes are a wonderful improvement—if you want to use the Curves control, you simply choose it and drag the controls in the miniature Curves dialog in the color-correction palette. It’s a subtle improvement, but a long overdue one. On the other hand, the new nondestructive Layer Masks are a huge plus, as they let you change the softness, size, and transparency of layer masks without affecting the original, sharp mask. Users of Photoshop’s Smart Objects will appreciate that they can now have layer masks, and Smart Objects are editable with all of the Transform tools, including Distort, Skew, Perspective, and Scale.
For photographers, there are some very cool new tools and tweaks, starting with Context-Sensitive Scaling, which automatically stretches less-detailed background areas—think sky, grass, or water—while maintaining the size of foreground elements (people, faces, cars). It’s a really handy tool when you have to stretch images to fit existing placeholders on a page, a common issue in production-oriented page layout. If you’ve ever been distressed over some of the heavy-handed results of excessive Dodge and Burning, this tool is now much smarter, applying its area-specific lightening and darkening in a much more controlled fashion. Camera Raw now contains the trés cool nondestructive exposure and color-correction brushes and gradient tool from Lightroom, which is a great thing, but we’d be even happier to see this tools inside Photoshop proper.
Photoshop CS4 Extended has a new 3D menu, which opens up the app to true 3D image manipulation, including mapping images onto 3D objects, distorting them on 3D surfaces, painting on 3D objects, and nice final rendering quality. That said, anyone interested in doing real 3D work is already using a dedicated modeling, rendering, and animation program, and that crowd is going to be underwhelmed by the built-in 3D tools in CS4 Extended.
So now let’s get to the big negatives: Photoshop CS4 is not a 64-bit application, an issue for those working with huge files—and lots of RAM. Given that the Windows version is 64-bit, we’re less than thrilled. And then there’s the issue of upgrade pricing—$349 to upgrade from CS3 Extended is simply too much money; in fact, the $199 upgrade price strikes us as a bit steep for the average Photoshop user. The way the current pricing scheme works, Adobe makes it almost impossible not to spring for the entire CS4 suite, which gets expensive quickly.
Photoshop CS4 is a strong revision—there’s a lot to like, which is why it earns our Editor’s Choice designation. We suspect that many serious Photoshoppers will spring for the upgrade, but we also hope Adobe takes a closer look at how much it charges for upgrades in the future. They don’t call us starving artists for nothing, folks.
Nondestructive layer masks. Content-aware scaling. Cool additions to Camera Raw. Impressive productivity enhancements.
No 64-bit support. Expensive upgrade pricing.
fintel
December 08, 2009 at 5:25am
Photoshop feeds me :) CS4 feeds me more :)I write a blog about retouching. Last post - digital retouching price. Retouching that makes the world better.
