What’s new in Photoshop CS4

Earlier today, Adobe announced major upgrades to their entire line of products - except for Acobat - to the new Creative Suite 4. Since most of the applications in the various incarnations of the Creative Suite 4 are not necessarily relevant to this blog, I’ll just focus on what’s new in Photoshop CS4.

Already, there seems to be a lot of questions out there by designers and photographers wondering “should I upgrade to Photoshop CS4″. I think there is and I’m not just saying that because I work for a company that develops plug-ins for Photoshop. I really believe it and here’s just a few reasons why.

1. Photoshop CS4 is taking advantage of your GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). This makes rendering of effects or processing of filters ridiculously fast. I was in the audience at CS4 launch event in San Francisco and watching Johnny L from Adobe spin a 2 gigabyte file around like it was 100 kb JPG was incredible. Accessing the GPU for more processing power isn’t anything new. Video applications and 3D applications have been doing it for years, but it is great to see it happening in Photoshop CS4.

2. The new Mask palette. This may not seem like a big deal to some, but I like how Photoshop CS4 has brought the options from the Refine Edge dialog box into the new Mask Palette. When I use Mask Pro 4, I like to save those selections because sometimes I need to go back and refine them depending on the situation. Having these options available in the palette as opposed to the Refine Edge dialog is a nice time saver for me. Your mileage may vary.

3. The new Adjustments Palette. Adjustment layers are nothing new to Photoshop. In Photoshop CS3 and earlier, you would typically access these by going to the bottom of the Layers palette and then clicking on adjustment layer and then choosing the type of adjustment you wanted to make. Or you could go to the Layer menu and choose New Adjustment Layer. Now in Photoshop CS4, you get the option to click on the new Adustments Palette (which happens to be grouped with the Mask palette) and you get a nice icon representation of the various adjustment layers that can be added. Maybe this hasn’t gotten you too excited yet, but what’s nice is that right below those icons are a bunch of Adjustment Layer Presets.

For regular readers of this blog, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of presets (onOne makes presets for Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw in addition to our new onOne Exchange site for PhotoTools presets). They can save you tons of time. Well, now Adobe has given us Adjustment Layer presets and they are written in a way that they are easy to understand no matter what your skill level in Photoshop is. The presets are very similar (perhaps identical, I haven’t checked yet) to the adjustment presets in Adobe Camera Raw. I love having access to these in Photoshop CS4 though.

4. Share My Screen. This is a great new feature that will be very familiar to those who have ever used Acrobat Connect before. It lets you share your screen with another person (client, co-worker, etc) over the internet so they can see what you are trying to communicate. Also, you can grant access to the other person so they can take control of your mouse. It’s pretty cool. We use Acrobat Connect all the time at work, but having the ability to stay within Photoshop CS4 and say Share my Screen, well, I think that’s kinda cool. Not everybody needs this feature. For example, you work alone and never need to show anybody anything. This feature isn’t for you and won’t entice you to upgrade to Photoshop CS4. But I’ll use this feature all the time and will be very valuable to me.

5. Improved Auto Blend Layers. This feature was in Photoshop CS3 and I used it to blend my panorama shots that I stitched together using PhotoMerge. Now in Photoshop CS4, when you select two or more layers in a document and choose Auto Blend you get a Blend Method dialog box (you didn’t before, it just did its thing) giving you two options. The first method is the Panorama method and pretty much does what it did in Photoshop CS3. But new in Photoshop CS4, you get a second option called Stack Images.

This is cool. What you can do with it is take areas of focus in the different layers and have Photoshop CS4 automatically mask out the out of focus area leaving you with an image that has everything in focus. This is going to have a lot of application and use for macro photography and for landscape photography where you want to be able to have pretty much unlimited depth of field. Just take a bunch of shots (on a tripod) and manually focus to get the areas you want in focus. Bring them into Photoshop CS4 and with this feature, you’ll get a final image that has everything in focus. Pretty cool stuff. If you’re having a hard time envisioning this, I’ll prepare some examples for a future blog post.

That’s all for now. I think this is a pretty compelling upgrade for the serious Photoshop user that will provide lots of new benefits.

Source: ononesoftware.com