Adobe’s CS4 features major changes for photographers
Posted by Kathleen Maher on September 29th 2008 | Discuss
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Adobe has been readying the market for its new CS4 lineup of software products for months now and anticipation is high. This is a performance release as well as a feature release, although we saw a few features that are going to need a little more work. This fast review is a quick overview concentrating primarily on the imaging tools. We will follow up with a look at the other modules as soon as we catch our breath.
With CS4, Adobe has worked hard to finalize the integration of the Macromedia products and the Adobe products. For the most part, there is a new interface that is much easier to figure out and for those who don’t want any surprises in their work environment, it’s possible to revert to older layouts in some cases.
Adobe is supporting the graphics processors, multi-CPUs and, in some programs, Windows 64-bit Operating Systems (Photoshop Extended natively supports 64-bit Windows Vista, Acrobat Pro natively supports 64-bit Windows XP, and Vista 64-bit). As a result, the programs work faster with filters, large amounts of data, video processing, and more.
As we note in our review of Photokina this issue, files are inevitably going to get larger as digital camera capabilities go up.
Professional photographers working in media and large formats with camera files that go up to 40 megapixels, are going to find themselves being a lot more productive in the 64-bit version. Photographers working with smaller files will also see the benefit of 64-bit processing because Adobe keeps the editing history in RAM so that, even as you make lots of edits, the image will not become unwieldy.
The other most important aspect of the new CS4 is that the tools are a lot easier to understand. There are menus in the Adobe products that have been frankly mysterious to new users—Adobe has done a lot of work to add visual cues and pop-up tags to make it easier to get to work. Illustrator seems to have especially benefitted from this treatment. Adobe has also used the Web 2.0 concept to build in access to support communities of users who can post their own tips and tricks.
The Bridge, Adobe’s interface between its tools and your media has been a good idea but not so great in practice. In CS4, the Bridge is faster and it’s easier to understand in the context of file management and the ability to work between programs has considerably improved.
The Bridge, a promising but ultimately unsatisfying tool in earlier versions of CS is fast becoming a favorite feature in the new CS4—there is a wealth of information available on the screen and it also offers easy access to the very much improved Camera Raw.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
One of the best features of the Bridge is its easy access to Camera RAW, which has been significantly improved. Camera RAW and Lightroom2 share the same code base and some of the nice new tools in Lightroom2, such as non-destructive dodge, burn, sharpen and other editing tools, are available in Camera RAW.
CS4 is all about workflow. Adobe hopes to fit into its customers’ workflow and make it easier for them to slide between the CS4 products including Flash. In fact, Adobe has added support for Flash throughout CS4. There is even support for Flash in Adobe’s page-layout tool InDesign and in Acrobat. Adobe has added more visual design tools to Flash for the code-phobic as it introduces them to interactive design including RIAs—rich interactive applications. On the interoperability front, work created in any of the CS4 tools can be imported and reused in another tool and even automatically updated.
In CS4 Extended, Adobe has continued its march into new territory with improved 3D tools. 3D is integrated into Photoshop so that you can work directly with 3D rather than through a special layer or dialog. The CS4 products understand 3D and images can be used as textures, 3D objects can be placed in Flash and video, and more. Adobe’s executives promise to continue to add to the products’ 3D capabilities but they also say they’re not interested in creating their own 3D tools.
Adobe has added Content-Aware scaling. The image on the left has been scaled using the traditional scaling tool in P hotoshop and as you see, it’s compressed—it’s especially noticeable for the god in the center of the scene. He maintains his full presence in the image to the right which was scaled with the new Content-Aware-Scale tool. Content-Aware Scaling looks for repetitive areas with repetitive pixels where it can do more processing and be less noticeable. It doesn’t work miracles—there are artifacts if you scale too aggressively, but Content-Aware Scaling is extremely handy for those awkward situations.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
In the end, says Chad Siegel, Adobe’s Group Product Manager for Adobe Creative Solutions, the goal of CS 4 is to help users break out of silos. Work that is done for one print job can easily be reused on others and repurposed for the web or even a video effect in Flash, Premiere, or After Effects. More importantly, Adobe’s is trying to teach their customers new tricks for a new age of media.
Creative Suite 4 Design Premium combines full versions of: InDesign CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, Illustrator CS4, Acrobat 9 Pro, Dreamweaver CS4, Flash CS4 Professional, and Fireworks CS4.
