Adobe Photoshop CS4 11.0 Extended (Win) (EN) (65016097) - Reviews

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13.3.2009

For imaging professionals Photoshop CS4 is an essential upgrade. Immediate impressions? Well I dislike the new interface, all light grey and no colour to any menu, almost impossible to quickly tell which image is active, plus all the menu locations have been tweaked about for no obvious reason [e.g. Auto-contrast and Auto-Colour is now in the main Image menu, not under Adjustments]. Also CS4 starts more slowly than CS3 [still faster than CS2 though thank goodness]. Sitting here looking at my gorgeous Office 2007 ribbon interface I wonder what Adobe are playing at. Granted with a colour picture loaded things improve visually [and I suppose we perceive colour in context, so stray colours are 'bad'],but I work a lot with black and white [microscope] images and boy the program looks dreary with them.Of course these whinges aside, the new tool locations roughly in the same menu place as before, and it might save a second or so's time using them in their new location. Images are now fixed tabbed [as Docker Panels] and indexed from above [the active image then being the only one on view], and this works really well [plus the photos can be dragged down and left as randomly floating about panels, Mac style - and then slid back & docked again]. Also the loss of the blue windows bar gives you a tad more workspace. Plus the new features of Photoshop CS4 make this a very worthwhile upgrade indeed.The application bar gives access to the stand-alone Adobe Bridge, where you can manage your image files, and it has its own set of tools to automatically modify images if required [not something I use much as I tend to spend a lot of time on a few images rather than a small amount of time on a lot, but great if you need to get photos off the camera and out to customers quickly, Adobe Lightroom style]. There's been a complete overhaul of Photoshop's image-adjustment tools, which now concentrate on non-destructive editing. The Adjustment Panel has been changed for the better and includes the new Vibrance tool. This new adjustment panel is great, giving you an efficient centralised control panel for live fine-tuning every aspect of your image. Plus the non-destructive changes mean that you can simply re-adjust your changes back or near to any previous setting. It's all simply superb. Likewise Masks has been re-invented and made easier to use, so that editing regions of the image is now simpler than before. In fact the whole way Photoshop edits pixels has been streamlined, and the program can now tap directly into your graphics card hardware acceleration to make this all far smoother. Plus all the tools seemed to have had a bit of a makeover to help you work more productively. And now you can resize your image in real time using Content Aware Image Scaling, where you just drag your image to resize [and the image magically loses all the uninteresting areas as you do it] - well that's the theory, on my fast 2.4MHz quad core gaming PC it all freezes up instead [probably a bug with the present NVidia drivers]. So get the latest Adobe Patches ASAP [as usual], and now the latest graphics card drivers as well.In fact overall the entire Photoshop editing experience has changed very much for the better, making this a great buy [particularly when the workplace is footing the bill]. With this Photoshop CS4 'extended' you get everything in standard Photoshop CS4, plus tools for editing 3D and motion-based content and for performing image analysis [both of which probably aren't essential for many users]. To be honest CS4 Extended doesn't offer much more than the features present on CS3 extended, although it is all graphic hardware accelerated now. That said I use the features on CS3 extended, so I do need CS4 extended [as I really want the new interface and tools offered in the `basic' CS4 Photoshop]. And the more I use it, the more I appreciate the new dull but worthy grey interface.I get Photoshop CS4 Extended `free' via work, and we get massive educational discounts (for departmental use at university). However you can get a pretty hefty discount on Photoshop yourself if you have a student/schoolchild in the house (from Primary School to degree level), so definitely check out adobe.com's Education Store and Amazon for this version instead if you qualify. The educational licenced version is identical to this retail version, just with licence restrictions prohibiting commercial use. Other reviwers here have commented on the actual process of activating the student licence [my Departmental education licence came from the University IT shop as a DVD + licence code, students have to register with Adobe etc. to get the activation code, which is more of drag].Photoshop still has a steep learning curve though for new users, largely due to the rather poor Photoshop help, e.g. you can still ask any question and often get quite good detailed help on the correct command/palette to use - but it typically never tells you where to actually find that command in the menu system ! Intermediate photo editing users, and people using their own money, should probably stick to the cheaper and simplified Photoshop Elements 7 - which you can buy with its sister Premiere Elements 7 (video editing) as a double pack (again an cheaper educational licence is available). Plus there's the powerful `quick image processing' Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 that comes in between Photoshop and Elements, pricewise. In addition home users or offices on a tight budget should check out Serifs PhotoPlus [excellent], MoviePlus [good] and PagePlus DTP [superb] offerings, and there's also Corel's excellent Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 to consider.So, Photoshop CS4 is still the industry standard photo/image editing software with no real competitors [although Corel might quibble that] - simply the best around, but sadly also at a very high price unless you qualify for that educational discount.