Adobe Photoshop / Extended CS4 review

RECOMMENDED

VERDICT An excellent release that reworks Photoshop’s core colour correction capabilities making them even more productive and powerful.

Adobe Photoshop is universally recognized as the most powerful photo-editor available, but Adobe isn’t resting on its laurels. With Photoshop CS4, Adobe is determined to make the best even better.
As always, this starts with the interface which has been reworked to make the absolute most of your screen real estate with new self-adjusting docker panels, easily selectable document tabs and the removal of Windows’ wasteful Title bar (though its absence takes a while to get used to). In its place Photoshop CS4 adds a new Application Bar alongside the existing Menu bar. This provides instant access to zoom controls, the new Workspace Switcher and a range of new workspace presets and the Arrange Documents dropdown where you can quickly choose between a selection of window layouts.
Photoshop CS4’s Application Bar also provides quick access to the separate Bridge CS4 application for visual creative asset management. With its new Workspace switcher, presets, search capabilities and Path bar for hard disk management Bridge CS4 has been significantly improved and is a serious bonus across all the Creative Suite bundles and most of the CS4 apps.
Bridge CS4 is particularly important for Photoshop users as it makes the natural partner for visually managing files and offers some dedicated functionality. Select multiple panorama shots and the PhotoMerge command and Photoshop automatically aligns and processes the images to produce the final composite which, thanks to new new vignetting and geometric distortion corrections, now offers virtually seamless blending of frame edges. The same Auto-Align and Auto-Blend processing engine can also now be used to greatly enhance the depth of field and tonal range for multiple bracketed shots of the same image. In each case inspecting the layer blends shows just how far Photoshop will go to pull the best out of your images.
Bridge CS4 has just as much to offer when opening single standalone images into Photoshop as it allows you to open them into the dedicated Camera Raw 5 utility. Here you are provided with access to a whole host of powerful colour correction power – with all changes in Camera Raw 5 now recognized in Lightroom 2 and vice versa. Camera Raw 5 also adds the ability to localize adjustments to particular areas of the image with its introduction of an Adjustment Brush for creating non-destructive and re-editable masks.

Camera Raw 5 now offers brush-based control over its non-destructive adjustments.

As its name suggests, Camera Raw 5 really comes into its own with unprocessed, camera raw formats but it also provides similar non-destructive editing of TIFFs and JPEGs and deserves to be much better known and utilised. Adobe could be accused of deliberately playing down the benefits of Camera Raw as in many ways its efficient, non-destructive colour correction makes Photoshop itself look awkward and old-fashioned. Well not any more. The core focus of Photoshop CS4 is a total overhaul of its image adjustment capabilities to put the focus on non-destructive editing.
In fact Photoshop has long offered such power since version 6’s introduction of adjustment layers back in 2000. However these have always been so awkward to use and hidden away that most users have probably forgotten that they are there. Now they move centre stage with a new Adjustments panel providing instant icon-based access to each layer type – 15 in all including a new Vibrance option which offers greater control over color saturation while preserving delicate tones such as skin colors. Below the generic icons, Photoshop CS4 also provides access to a list of presets for the main adjustments meaning that you can quickly add layers to increase contrast, lighten shadows, boost red and so on.
In the past, adjustment layers were first defined and later refined in their own dialogs which was powerful but awkward and offputting. Now, whenever you add an adjustment or click on it in the Layers panel, its settings automatically appear in the Adjustment panel ready for editing. Switch to the Color and Tone workspace which stacks the Histogram, Adjustments and Layers panels above each other and you have an efficient centralized control panel for live fine-tuning of every aspect of your image. Excellent.
Photoshop CS4 takes this new live editing further for the two most important and powerful adjustments. Both the Curves and Hue/Saturation adjustments now offer on-image control. With the Curves panel you can click anywhere on an image to select that tone and dragging up will brighten it and dragging down will darken it. With the Hue/Saturation adjustment, clicking selects a colour range based on the selected pixel values and dragging left desaturates it while dragging right boosts it – and Ctrl-dragging shifts hue. This interactive handling is another feature borrowed directly from Lightroom and it makes advanced tone and colour control not just intuitive but enjoyable.

Photoshop CS4 completely reworks its approach to colour correction.

Photoshop CS4’s new adjustment layer handling is great for global colour correction of the image as a whole, but often you’ll want to limit an adjustment to a particular area or colour range. To do this, and to keep the localization fully non-destructive and re-editable, you have to create a layer mask. Again this used to be unnecessarily awkward and offputting and again Photoshop CS4 reinvents the process and puts it centre stage. Using the new Masks panel you can quickly add both pixel and vector masks, invert them, change their density and feathering and call up the Refine Mask command for even finer control of edges and size. Even better, the panel provides instant access to the Colour Range dialog which now lets you create masks based on multiple sampled colours live on the image.
The strength of the mask-based approach to local adjustments is that everything remains fine-tunable. Often, however, particularly when retouching, you’ll actually want to get in and change the pixel values permanently. Despite its new non-destructive focus, Photoshop CS4 hasn’t forgotten its retouching responsibilities. For starters, the core Dodge, Burn and Sponge retouch tools have been reworked to preserve tonal quality to produce much more naturalistic results. The Clone Stamp and Healing Brush have also been revamped and now provide a cursor preview so that you get a much better idea of the effect the tool will produce.
It’s not just the tools that have been enhanced, Photoshop CS4’s whole approach to direct pixel editing has been streamlined and made more productive. You can now interactively and quickly resize your brush onscreen and change its hardness. You can also now temporarily switch to a different tool by holding down its shortcut key which proves especially useful when changing zoom level or panning. When navigating around your image like this, Photoshop CS4 now provides hardware accelerated zoom capabilities on all OpenGL-based systems to make the whole process completely smooth and stutter-free. You can even smoothly rotate your image onscreen whenever you need to create or follow angled lines.

Content Aware Scaling is Photoshop CS4’s jaw dropper.

And Photoshop CS4 provides one real jaw-dropper with its new Content Aware Image scaling. Using this you can drag to resize your image in real time and, while you do so, Photoshop CS4 automatically removes just the uninteresting areas! When you first see this, the effect is almost magical leaving you wondering just how Photoshop pulled it off. In fact, as with all Photoshop’s power, it comes down to analyzing and manipulating pixel values – in this case identifying seams of high-frequency pattern and seamlessly removing them.
Content aware image scaling is amazing and genuinely useful, but only for suitable images such as those involving repetitive expanses of sand, grass, water and cloud. Photoshop CS4’s real magic is the way that it has reworked its whole approach to photo editing to let you bring the absolute best out of all images. And it wasn’t exactly bad in the first place.
Tom Arah

EASE OF USE 5/6
FEATURES 6/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 4/6
OVERALL 5/6

Requirements: Windows XP (SP2), Vista