Adobe Photoshop CS4

As of Sep 23 the cat is finally out of the bag, so I'd like to share few personal comments about Abobe PS CS4. I must preface these notes that I was only interested in primary photography related workflow, so I can't say much about other apps from the Creative Suite. I also wasn't interested in 3D or Video stuff, so nothing on this part either. :dunno
Also, I understand that many of the Bridge and, especially, ACR features could have been found in LR2.0

Below are my brief comments I made for myself
Bridge

This is the first app you'll see and, from my experience, will be spending most of your time in.

• It's MUCH faster.
• Can use persistent preview instead of generating thumbnails each time
• New Review mode (Ctrl+B) simplifies the culling process A LOT with its easy-to-use minimalistic left-right-(thumb)down interface. I cannot overemphasize how much the life is easier with this - fairly simple - addition.
• Simple "Space" stroke engages a trimmed down version of SlideShow, instantly bringing image full-screen (and back)
• Searches and Smart collections (saved Search results) uses OS-built-in indexing services for huge performance boost
• You can AutoStack panoramas/hdrs

Camera RAW (ACR) 5.x

• Adjustment Brush (K) and Graduated Filter (G) allows the non-destructive local corrections of several major parameters (exposure, saturation, etc.)
  WARNING: slows down the loading...
• Post Crop Vignetting is a true blessing

All in all in many cases I only found myself launching PS only when I needed to work with multiple layers, add text/fx and such.


Photoshop

• Holding H (and pressing the mouse) engages a spring loaded bird view (fit all) panning mode (not in all modes)
• Animated panning/zooming (requires hardware OpenGL support)
• Ctrl+Space+MouseDown zooms at the cursor, Alt+Space+MouseDown zooms out
• New frameless tabbed UI is actually pretty handy
• New advanced histogram
• New mask and adjustment layers palette
• Masks can have their own opacity, feathering, edge refining, etc.
• New Adjustment Layers:
  • Exposure
  • Vibrance
• Hue/Saturation and Curves adjustment layers have uber-powerful "painting on screen" mode, just like B/W one.
• New Rotate tool in the main tool bar - with direct on-screen rotation a la LR.
• Better icons and more colors in adjustment layers
• Ctrl+1 is now 100% view (used to be ctrl+alt+0, which still works), which is more logical for new users, considering Ctrl+0 is "fit the screen".
  All the "color channel" views shortcuts are thus shifted by 2 (Composite is Ctrl+2, Red channel is now Ctrl+3, Green Ctrl+4, Blue Ctrl+5)
• Spring loaded keys for temporary tool usage
• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C for content-aware scaling (Edit menu), aka Seam Carving
• Extensions: kuler, and such
• Screen sharing (great for team work)
• Much improved layer alignment and blending (including 360 panos and focus stacking)

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That's what I noted and what I used. I'm sure I only covered the tip of the iceberg. Also, I didn't try that myself, but I know that PS CS4 has a great capability of handling super large files (over 1Gb), and is actually optimized for using 64bit OS. However, my experiments with blending a couple of dozens RAW files seemed to work much better/faster than it was to the case with CS3.

Conclusion
With numerous performance improvement across the board, OGL support, new local tools in ACR, improved and new tools in PS, this version is a much bigger step up from CS3 that the latter was to CS2.

HTH

Nikolai,

Good description! Once again your attention to what's new is shared and helpful. This has been appended to the current CS4 and related Photoshop Express thread in "Breaking News", here.

Asher