Creative Suite 4

Adobe’s new software, Creative Suite 4, is intended to meet special challenges such as effective collaborations between designers and developers, embracing new media, reinventing publishing and embracing the explosion of connected media.

Chad Seigel, Group Manager for Creative Suite has been quoted as saying, "Adobe is trying to break barriers and integrate all products."

Changes to Photoshop CS4 include an improved interface with the entire application enclosed in the frame which means dual monitor users can have more than one application running. The workspace switcher is for swapping between applications such as Camera RAW 5 and Bridge.

Some welcome improvements include zoom ratio which is less likely to show jagged or pixelated lines and also boasts a flicker free zoom.

You can also now rotate the canvas without jagged lines and the brush size can be previewed on the document. This means that when the tool is placed over the image it can be moved in size and allows you to see it before you use it.

64-bit Support

Another hardware change, for those using a Windows operating system, is support for 64-bit processors. Most users won't notice much of a speedup, perhaps 10 percent in some cases; however performance is much better in some memory-intensive areas where the 4GB limit of 32-bit software is a problem.

"For most people, with a 12-megapixel SLR file or doing Web design work, the difference they'll see is pretty negligible. The inflection point from 32-bit to 64-bit really happens where you would have run out of memory and would have had to go to your virtual memory system," storing data on the hard drive rather than in memory, Nack said. "There's a tenfold performance increase opening up a large file."

A companion program that is geared specifically for photographers, Photoshop Lightroom, offers 64-bit support for both Mac and Windows; unfortunately, Adobe couldn't do the 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4 for Mac OS X as it was busy moving to a new primary programming foundation from Apple, called Cocoa.

Photoshop CS4

Photoshop is famously known for taxing your computers resources, but beginning with the upcoming CS4 version, it'll finally be able to make use of the muscle of your computer's graphics chip.

Photoshop CS4 takes its first steps in using the graphics processing unit, or GPU. For example, the graphics chip helps Photoshop CS4 easily zoom in and out, rotate the canvas so you can easily reorient an image for the best sketching angle, display and manipulate 3D objects, and handle color correction.

Using integrated graphics chips opens up new doors but also creates its own challenges. First of all, graphics chips are designed to discharge pixels to the screen, not sending them back to the main processor, so not all tasks can be accelerated.

Another problem is that Adobe will need to work carefully on hardware compatibility and people with older machines may need to upgrade the video card; card with 128MB of memory is recommended.

The upgrade price for Photoshop is $199 for the Photoshop CS4 and $349 for CS4 Extended; prices for the new versions are $699 and $999.

The Extended version adds an assortment of special-purpose abilities for dealing with scientific applications, dealing with medical imagery, and creating 3D subject matter. The company also offers its consumer-level Photoshop Elements for about $100 and its online Photoshop Express for free.

CS4 and Adobe Bridge CS4

CS4 Suite New Features:

1. Flash SWF support across all applications
2. You can play SWF files in any app
3. A tool is being developed for creating flash content without any coding experience

Adobe Bridge CS4:

1. New User-Interface
2. Sidebar and search tool location similar to Mac OS Leopard
3. Navigation in folders similar to Windows Vista Explorer
4. Labels and star ratings are easier to access.
5. Filtered searches are now much faster even across thousands of images
6. List View in Bridge
7. Auto Photo Downloader to download photos from your camera is now easier and better than Bridge CS3
8. Improved slideshows using your spacebar
9. From Slideshow, press “r” and Adobe Camera Raw opens automatically.
10. Review Mode: (full screen review of photos)
a. Just like a full screen version of Apple coverflow
b. Loopt tool built in
c. The ability to open all, review, and drop photos out of view that you don’t want and others stay full screen
d. When leaving review mode the photos you kept are now selected in bridge. Ones you dropped are still there but not selected.
e. You now have the ability to create photo-collections from within review mode
11. Collections are just like Playlists in iTunes. You have the ability to group photos. The location where photos are stored is not changed.
12. More sharing options
a. Upload directly to FTP within Bridge
b. Web gallery templates are easy and use the same templates available in Lightroom 2
c. Ability to create flash galleries with a few clicks and upload instantly
d. Uses the Opera engine to render galleries within Bridge
e. Photoshop Web Gallery is going away and being replaced by Bridge Web Gallery
13. Bridge CS4 Menus (in order left to right)
File - Edit - View - Sttacks - Label - Tools - Window - Help

Adobe CS4 Applications are exactly the same as CS3 but the text in the icons is black instead of white.

Adobe CS4 In-Depth

Adobe Photoshop CS4:

Codename: Adobe Stonehenge CS4 Extended. Stonehenge is the splash screen.

1. The User-Interface is similar to CS3 however there are some minor polishes
2. Support for “Extensions” is listed under the “Window” menu
3. The extension manager is in every CS4 application
4. “Kuler” which is an Intranet color pallet collaboration tool for sharing color swatches with others on your team.
5. Support for Flash

Adobe Panel Configurator 1.0 (Alpha Version):

1. Allows you to create your own Photoshop toolboxes.
2. You can choose from over 860+ commands, tools and application features and from there create your own toolboxes that work in any CS4 application
3. Supports Actions and Scripts
4. Drag and drop text fields into toolboxes
5. Support for SWF and Quicktime video files in toolboxes
6. You can export the toolbar file and re-open it in any CS4 application.

More Notes on Adobe CS4

Obviously the pricing for the Adobe CS4 bundle suites has increased a bit both for upgrades and new purchases. Web Premium CS3 was $1599 US, whereas Web Premium CS4 will be $1699 US.

Design and Production Premium prices remain the same ($1799 US for Design Premium, $1699 for Production Premium), but the price of Design Standard is now $1399 US, up $200 from Design Standard CS3. Upgrade prices on suites appear to be about the same as CS3, although Web Premium is $100 more than it was 18 months ago.

If you had already purchased Design Premium CS3 before May, 2008, you will be happy to know that Fireworks is now included in this suite (it was included in suites sold after May of 2008 or if you paid the $160 to upgrade to Acrobat 9). In my opinion, Fireworks never should have been omitted from Design Premium in the first place, so this is a great addition.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 has been shipping sometime in October. One note for PPC Mac users -- Adobe After Effects CS4 will only support Intel systems. Premeire Pro CS4, like CS3, is also Intel-only

Some Notes on Adobe CS4

Adobe has officially announced the release of Creative Suite 4 via a streaming webcast. Adobe CS4, which shipped out in October, has been being hailed as "Adobe's biggest software release to date."

I've been playing with some of the CS4 betas since early summer and I tend to agree that the Macromedia products are now much more tightly integrated (at least on the Fireworks and Dreamweaver side, I haven't used the Flash CS4 beta) with the rest of the Adobe suite. When I was watching the webcast I was surprised by the focus on performance improvements and cross-product integration.

On the performance side, I found that the GPU acceleration rumors for Photoshop CS4 are a reality. What was surprising to me was that despite the all the commotion I had read about regarding the lack of 64-bit support for the Mac version of Photoshop CS4, all of the demonstrations for the webcast were performed on a Mac. The representative from Adobe worked on a 2 GB 400 megapixel file, demonstrating how easy it was to zoom in and out, and rotate the image without any delays or reduction in speed.

So, 32-bit or not, graphic design shops using Macs that have powerful systems can easily benefit from the speed improvements to Photoshop.

Adobe CS4 64-bit - Not for Mac? Part 2

Following on from Mondays Post...

Photoshop offers huge speed advantages for those who typically work with large images on systems with RAM of about 32GB and up. Even normal users will possibly see a performance increase of 8% to 12% when using the 64-bit version of Adobe's software compared to 32-bit.

Regrettably this means Mac OS X users will not be able to take advantage of the performance gains in CS4; those who do manipulate massive images on their Mac’s may need to use Windows until CS5 is released further down the road.

A Note: Ironically, when Photoshop was initially released back in 1988, the software was available for Macintosh only. The product didn't even ship for Microsoft's platform until 1992, when Adobe ported Photoshop 2.0 to Windows.

Adobe CS4 64-bit - Not for Mac? Part 1

In a complete very surprising move, Adobe CS4 includes 64-bit support for the Windows XP and Vista platform, but not for Mac.

According to Adobe's Photoshop product manager, John Nack, Mac OS X users won't get 64-bit support until the next release of the graphics editing software, CS5.

Nack attributes this move to the decision Apple made last year to stop development of 64-bit support for Carbon, a move which Nack says took Adobe and other third-party developers by surprise. Adobe did make CS3 Intel-compatible, but has retained Carbon as its foundation.

Nack wrote, in a recent blog entry, "At the WWDC show last June, [Adobe and] other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa [instead of] Carbon".

"We'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa."