Steve Weinrebe's Mode Studio

With Adobe’s announcement today of the new features that will be available in Photoshop CS4, I thought it might be time to chime in with the features that photographers especially will find important, and with some prioritizing as far as what you should really care about.

First of all, I have looked at descriptions of Photoshop CS4 at several web sites and I am amused that there is both erroneous and missing information. Adobe’s web site has the most accurate information, of course. John Nack’s blog covers a tremendous amount of minutia, all important and impressive. Out of curiousity I checked out Amazon’s page for Photoshop CS4 and found it to be more informative than several globally famous Photoshop web sites, and without all the “we’re cool” (think Richar Pryor and Gene Wilder walking the walk). So you can also, go to Amazon’s page, Photoshop CS4, where you can purchase Photoshop CS4 as well.

If you do visit the Amazon page, you’ll notice that Amazon lists Photoshop CS4 as being available on November 7. That’s important information because most of the web-zines introducing Photoshop CS4 mention vague shipping dates like “sometime in October”.

Some features are HUGE, and some features you might just smile about, and some features are important for only a select group of Photoshop users.

Top reasons for Photographers to upgrade:

Bridge CS4

• Everything starts with Bridge CS4. The new Bridge has a professional and elegantly polished interface with loads of useful buttons. And it is faster, which is probably the most important upgrade to help make Bridge become widely used.
• Gone are the silly #1,2,3 buttons at the bottom right of Bridge, and now we have a named menu of Bridge workspace options at the top of the screen.
• The nascent Adobe Media Gallery, long the inhabitant of Adobe Labs (seriously how many of you actually installed AMG into Bridge), is now the Adobe Output Module. This new interface provides print and web templates and, photographers take note, replaces Photoshop’s Contact Sheet II feature.
• There is a new carousel view, similar to Apple’s Cover Flow feature, that allows the user to flick through images in a rotating view of windows.
• Bridge CS4 has a new Stealth mode (Windows), or option to start at login (Mac) though Mac users always had that option in Login Preferences).
• Bridge CS4, near the top of the Bridge workspace, includes “breadcrumb” style file navigation, including drop-down file views. This is a leap in file search usability.
• Speaking of search, Bridge CS4 on the Mac now has the ability to not only conduct a Bridge search for a filename within a folder, but Spotlight searches (Current folder or Computer) as well.
• Bridge CS4 can now “auto collect” HDR and panorama images into stacks, great for trimming down the clutter in a Bridge window that contains multiples of these files.

Photoshop CS4

• The Mac community of Photoshop users can get ready for an interface wallop. Photoshop CS4 actually features a somewhat hidden interface view called the “Application Frame”. This user interface feature places all the panels, Tools and Options into one gray frame. At first blush this may look Windows-like to Mac users (indeed it is similar to the way Windows will place an open application into an entire frame on the screen), but take heart, and use it like a pro. If you have not used any professional Apple applications like FinalCut Pro, you are missing out on the convenience of a feature like this, especially for formalizing a single screen’s view of the Photoshop workspace. If you routinely use multiple monitors to work with Photoshop you may not want to use the Application Frame, but if you are on a laptop or have one large display, you should definitely try the Application Frame out.
• Content Aware Scaling (CAS) comes to Photoshop CS4. This feature surfaced last year as something called “seam carving”. CAS allows you to scale images narrower or wider, taller or shorter, without also scaling the most important portions of your image, a person for example. You can also use a mask to control which portions of your picture don’t get scaled. It is a breathtaking feature, well worth the upgrade price in itself. Every training class I give, during the discussion on cropping one student will ask “can I crop the picture to 8 x 10, for example, and still keep all the picture information”. Previously I would sigh, like if someone asks me, after a long lecture on shapes, if you could fit a square peg into a round hole. But now that is all changed, and yes, with Photoshp CS4 you can scale a photograph without loosing part of your picture. Note: there are limits, for example some architectural scenes don’t work very well with CAS. Watch for upcoming tutorials at DoubleExposure where I’ll demonstrate techniques to optimize Content Aware Scaling.
• Depth of Field Extension also comes to Photoshop CS4. Take 4 to 7 captures of a scene, each with the focus placed at a different portion of the scene, and use Photoshop CS4 to blend the images together optimizing the focused portions (using layer masks) to create one in-focus image. Again, watch for upcoming tutorials at DoubleExposure where I’ll demonstrate techniques to optimize Content Aware Scaling.
• Photoshop CS4 features much improved Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools. Previously I would gloss over these tools when teaching Photoshop because they were notoriously heavy handed. I’m pleased to say they work the way a photographer would hope they would, truly tweaking the exposure, or saturation (Sponge), with a brush. When adjusting exposure with Dodge and Burn, they actually preserve color and tonal information while lightening or darkening.
• Color Range, an age-old and often overlooked selection feature in Photoshop, has been greatly improved to include localized color clusters (that’s a mouthful) to better adapt the mask to areas of the color clicked on, and not other parts of the image that have a little of that color blended into it.
• Vibrance and Saturation have arrived big-time as an image adjustment all their own, in Photoshop CS4.
• We can now perspective transform Smart Objects, something that frustrated anyone without a perspective control lens or view camera, who liked to use Smart Objects.
• Photoshop CS4 includes a host of visual interface features that use the memory on your graphics card. However only recent graphics cards with 128 MB or vram or more will work with these features. A computer as recent as a couple of years old may not allow these features to work. Don’t fret because there is little about the functionality of Photoshop that won’t work with OGL. Because I never believed you should have to run out for a new computer for every new release of Photoshop, I won’t go on here about OGL features, and you can find plenty about those features elsewhere.
• One interface feature I will rave about though is N-up views. Photoshop CS4 users can have multiple windows open on screen and choose one of the N-up views from the new App-bar at the top of the workspace to view all the windows at once in a nice clean, orderly, workspace.
• Free Share-my-screen feature – yes, free. That means you can share Photoshop CS4 screens from one computer to another. What’s more it is a complete Acrobat Connect session. This has broad implications for collaboration and teaching. I, for one, will be offering some online training components for advanced Photoshop training sessions.

That’s all I’ll cover here but it’s plenty to digest. Sift through all the news, just be aware that there is some misinformation out there. Photoshop CS4 is a big jump in how we work with our images and the learning begins today. Next post I will mention some features in the new version of Camera Raw, though if you have Lightroom 2.0 you will be familiar with many of the new ACR features.

Posted by Steve Weinrebe