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Adobe Photoshop CS4 – Beta Preview
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I’ve had a Beta (pre-production) copy of Adobe’s flagship image editing program for a couple of weeks now, so I’ve had a bit of time to play with it and explore the new features and improvements. I was generally impressed by the amount of work that had gone into it, but it wasn’t until I met up with product managers Bryan Hughes and Kevin Connor on Adobe’s stand at Photokina, and spent nearly two hours being given a full guided tour of the program, that I came to realise that I hadn’t seen half of it. There's a handy little feature under the Basics button in the top right corner of the interface called What's New In CS4, which adds a highlight to all the menu options that have new or improved features. Here's what it looks like on just the File menu:
If you look at all the menus, and bear in mind that there are numerous sub-menus which also have new items, they look like the image below. As you can see there's a lot of new stuff.
When Photoshop CS2 and CS3 were launched there was some criticism that the updates were of a very minor nature, and some felt that the high cost of the program was not justified by the level of the upgrade. However there is no way that those accusations can be levelled at CS4. Virtually the entire program has been upgraded, with many new functions and features added, and major improvements have been made to many others.
I'll be writing a full review of the retail version hopefully in a few weeks, but for now here's a preview to highlight some of the many changes and improvements to this industry-standard program.
Tabbed Interface
The most obvious improvement is to the interface itself. Taking a cue from the latest web browsers, the main work area now uses tabs, so that it’s much quicker and easier to find the picture you want, especially if you have several images open at the same time. There is also a new option to arrange two, three or four open images in a number of default patterns, such as vertical or horizontal tiling, three-up, four-up etcetera, very useful if, like me, you regularly have to compare several similar images side-by-side.
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Luan Bach said on 30th September 2008
harvi said on 1st October 2008
well buy in the USA then. Untill people vote with their feet and wallets these criminal differences in prices will persist...."rip off britain" is alive and kicking
PK Son said on 2nd October 2008
Almost overwhelming! Looking forward to it!
Ronnie I said on 9th June 2009
Does CS4 accept Nikon D300 RAW Images. I was using CS2 in the past and with my Nikon D50 I could retrieve RAW images. But when I upgraded to the D300 CS2 would not retrieve RAW Fil... more
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Have you seen the pricing different between US and UK ? Adobe are usually the worse offender for the "Being UK" tax, but this really takes the biscuit.