Steve Weinrebe's Mode Studio

Photoshop product manager John Nack has posted an informational article on his excellent blog discussing Photoshop’s transition to 64-bit native computing, in light of the newly released Lightroom 2.0 Beta, which will run as 64-bit on both Mac and Windows. His pre-emptive announcement is that Photoshop CS4, when it comes out (no indication as to the “when” yet), will be available as a 64-bit native application for Windows only, and not the Mac. He explains this in detail, but the impact is measured only by how you use Photoshop, and what kind of computer equipment you have. The advantage of the 64-bit application is that it can access more than 4 gigabytes of RAM. This allows for considerable speed increases in certain tasks, which will be most noticeable if you work on very large image files. So if you do not work on large hight-res image files or you do not have more than 4 gigabytes of RAM in you computer, then this is a non-issue. If you do, then you may want to read John’s broad explanation of the subject, here.

Posted by Steve Weinrebe