Adobe
Photoshop CS4 Veteran set of powerful imaging tools streamlined user interface
more extensible and customization; completely overhauled 3D engine in Extended
version. If you work with 3D, Photoshop Extended is a must-have upgrade; ditto
if you think you d use more of Standard tools if the interface were less
opaque, if you need to upgrade other suite applications, or if you qualify for
an academic discount. All things considered, while Adobe Photoshop CS4 makes
some improvements over CS3, it might be worth skipping this generation and waiting
for the next. Photoshop and Photoshop Extended most notably, usability
improvements for core features that many people will find themselves sighing,
biting the bullet, and upgrading.
If
you work with video or 3D, or want to update your Creative Suite to CS4 for
other reasons, this is a no brainer; for the rest of us, there little you can
do with CS4 that you couldn’t t do with CS3, and the latter seems a bit faster
and more memory efficient in some respects. The Web abounds with complaints
about Adobe installer and updater, and I think most are quite justified. Every
Windows application installer suggests you close any running applications, but
you can usually ignore it and 99 percent of the time everything works out fine.
Adobe forces you to close your browser and all Microsoft Office applications,
because many of the programs in the suite primarily Acrobat spread octopus like
tentacles throughout your working environment.
That
pretty appalling in and of itself, but in addition to wasting a large chunk of
time installing, you can t do anything else but play Solitaire while it
happening. And as before with the updater, you’ll get to relive this delightful
close your apps or else experience on a regular basis. Even as I type it
stopped dead waiting for me to close Firefox. Plus, the installation progress
bar bears no relation to reality whatsoever, with its two steps forward and one
step back movement. Over and over again, all of this adds up to a one-point
demerit for Adobe on its Setup and Interface rating. Adobe Photoshop CS4 extended
users will benefit more immediately from these underlying changes than Standard
users. For the latter, OpenGL support primarily manifests itself as some whiz
screen zooming and rotation tools that demo well but likely won t get used
much.
However,
Adobe has greatly improved extended 3D support. It now offers most of the
essential render settings and view controls, plus the ability to create
primitives (and extend the library of primitives), necessary to work with 3D
models. You edit and paint on textures simply by double-clicking on them in the
Layers palette, then see your changes applied when you toggle back to the
model; not quite real-time, interactive painting, but close enough for now and
now there basic keyframe animation for 3D scenes. Still there room for
improvement: it needs better lighting handling and the ability to tile and more
easily position textures, and several aspects of the interface, like the
Rendering options, are still far too dialog driven and Photoshop gets very slow
when you load (or generate via the Mesh from gray scale command) relatively
complex models with tens of thousands of polygons.
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