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Adobe Photoshop CS4 Editorial Review:
Introducing Fluid Canvas Rotation

Smoother panning and zooming and fluid canvas rotation
Navigate to any area of an image with new, ultra-smooth zooming and panning. Maintain clarity as you zoom to individual pixels and easily edit at the highest magnification with the new Pixel Grid. And use the revolutionary new Rotate View tool to smoothly turn your canvas for distortion-free viewing at any angle.

Create powerful images with the professional standard

Adobe Photoshop CS4 software provides improved access to its unrivaled power through a more intuitive user experience, greater editing freedom, and significant productivity enhancements.

Did you know.......

There's a solution for pro photographers
Buy Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom 2 together and you can import, process, manage, edit, composite, and showcase your images - and save 30% on Lightroom.

Working with images is now easier
Navigate around images more naturally with fluid canvas rotation and enhanced pan and zoom tools.

Education discounts are available
As a student or educator, you qualify for education pricing. See the full list of products available for purchase.

DNG raw format is supported
The DNG format helps promote archival confidence, since digital-imaging software solutions will be able to open your raw files more easily in the future.

Customer Reviews:
Photoshop WAS the best image editing software ever.
I have been using Photoshop for the last 10 years and this version is impossible. I am running a powerful PC system. Sometimes the marquee tool takes seconds to appear and usually selects the wrong pixels. I just used the slice tool to create a gif that was 50px high on the screen and in the dialog window. the actual exported image was 49px. WTF? For a web graphics professional this is unacceptable and a severe disruption to my workflow. Photoshop CS3 is the best. If you have a copy I would stick with it. The major upgrades to CS4 seem to be some eye candy that slows down your system and plain old doesn't work.

A Truely Brilliant Multipurpose Application
Photoshop CS4 has been noted for as one of the most versatile photo editing applications in the world. Photoshop CS4 also has a number of other features that make it worthwhile. To the professional designer, Photoshop CS4 can be utilized to perform photo-correcting, making brochures and such, and other things. However, as powerful as this program is, there are a few things to be noted with. Photoshop Cs4 is not the most brilliant program in CREATING pictures from scratch. I find it really difficult to do that and such. Also, to use Photoshop CS4 effectively, you gotta learn how to do it. CS4 is not just a look and do program. It takes a book or two to learn from to utilize.

I'm an aspiring graphic designer in 8th grade. As a person who wants to create pictures instead of correcting them, I find the task extremely time consuming and strenouous. In CREATING your own pictures, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 is an awesome product to use in creating not just pictures of your own, but VECTOR images!

Photoshop CS4 lacks in CREATION, but brings in the power of correction, and multipurpose functionality.

No Customer Service
Just know this... they'll answer the phone immediately if you're placing an order. Call them about anything else and be prepared to wait a half an hour or more. Their customer service by phone is awful.

Avoid like the plague!!!!!!!
This version of Photoshop is an alpha version at best. Painful update issues, bad performance, glitch menu redraw problems and the headache of the tab system(part of which can be turned off). This is after getting the new patch!!!!! I love Photoshop but CS4 is a train wreck!

Perfect for my Use
I primarily use Photoshop for painting, sketching, drawing etc, and I can safely say, it's my favorite program for doing this sort of work. Ive tried Painter, and Sketchbook Pro, but Photoshop trumps both in terms of ease of use, and productivity. This is, of course, my own experience. But, specifically, CS4's interface makes the work to be done off of the canvas quick and simple, so you can get back to work faster. The interface is perfect for my work too, because it fades into the background when you're working, but when you need a tool, it's easy to navigate and find what you want. It isn't flashy, and doesn't have carnival lights; it's simple, clean, and intuitive. That's what makes the UI for CS4 so amicable, and facilitates the whole program's ease of use.

One thing that's always been in the forefront of facilitating speed is the brush system. You can just pick and choose which brushes you like the most and use the most often, and remove the rest from the list, making it quick and easy to access your tools. But, I'd have to say, the most useful part of the brush system is the right click menu. Being able to right click anywhere on the canvas and change the size and softness of the brush, change brushes, create new brushes, load a new set of brushes, and all that other good stuff, is invaluable. If the Flow and Opacity controls were in there it'd be even better, but that isn't really a complaint, the Flow and Opacity sliders are placed just fine how they are now.

I also can't overstate the usefulness of masks, and paths/work paths. They can make tasks a snap when used right. I can't really comment on the Filters and Image adjustments though, seeing as I hardly ever use them in painting, so I'll move onto the last segment of the review now instead. :P

As for the extra tools of Extended, even though I do 3d modeling often, I've used direct painting tools before in programs like Zbrush and Mudbox, and I'd much rather take the time to properly UVmap the model, and paint the texture in Photoshop in 2D. So, I can't comment on how worth the extra $300 that feature is for most, but I'd never use it, along with the other Extended features. Also, the rendering feature is nice an all, but I'd MUCH rather use Mental Ray.

Oh and one other thing: the plugins. Oh the plugins. A vast wealth of file formats to save to and to open. I find myself using JPEGs the most, but I use PSD (duh) GIF, PNG, TGA, and IFF often too, and occasionally BMP. I've never had any problems with saving to or opening any file format, and no problems with artifacting. Plus, opening image sequences is a nice thing to have when you're rendering an animation in Mental Ray. (MR can't render to video, it only renders individual frames)

Overall view: Buy it if you do work like mine. Your total time spent on a project will suffer if you use a lesser program. Obviously there are a lot of features I don't know about or haven't explored, but what the hey, no other program gives me this level of flexibility with this much ease of use, so it's worth its weight in gold.

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>> >>Software >>Categories >>Photo, Media & Design >>Photo Editing