New Features in Photoshop CS4

September 23, 2008: Aside from a re-designed, tab-based user interface, the latest version of Adobe Photoshop provides some exciting new features for digital photographers.
Available in two versions, Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended the latest version refines and redefines the professional image-editing experience, with faster, nondestructive ways to accomplish image adjustments and masks and new tools and enhancements that let users work more easily, efficiently, and naturally. Photoshop CS4 Extended adds features for professionals working with specialised image types and multimedia workflows, including 3D editing and compositing, richer motion-graphics capabilities and enhanced image analysis functions.

The re-designed desktop interface puts frequently-used tools within easy access.
The new Adjustments panel enables users to go straight to the adjustments they need. It also offers a new Vibrance adjustment, which provides greater control over colour saturation while preserving delicate tones, such as skin colours. On-image adjustments are now available for Hue/Saturation and Curves. The Adjustment panel also features a wide variety of modifiable presets for each type of change, including more than 20 new pre-configured, customisable starting points.

The new Masks panel has simple slider controls for makign fine adjustments.
The new Masks panel makes it easier to apply effects to precisely defined areas of an image. Simple slider controls enable users to adjust the density and feathering of a mask, control both the sharpness of the mask edge and how much of the adjustment effect to reveal. The Refine Mask feature provides additional fine control over the mask size and edges. Colour Range control has been upgraded for better accuracy and power. It’s a fast way to automatically create powerful and detailed masks based on single or multiple colours, with simple controls for the spatial tolerance and “fuzziness” of the colour sampling. The Clone tool now provides a preview of the cloned selection, making it easy to position the cursor accurately.

The Clone tool provides a preview of the cloned selection.
The newly refined Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools in Photoshop CS4 take the effort out of preserving tonal quality while you spot-correct exposure and color saturation. Simply paint the area you want to adjust and get advanced results in a fraction of the time. The automatic alignment and blending technology in Photoshop CS4 enhances a wide variety of features, particularly in Photomerge, which now includes the ability to create 360-degree panoramas, automatic detection of fish eye lenses and a new Collage option which rotates and scales individual images as they are combined using Auto-Align and Photomerge.
Content-Aware Scaling is the revolutionary new feature in Photoshop CS4 that lets you resize and recompose simultaneously. This the feature analyses the image in the background while you adjust it and intelligently recomposes the scene to preserve the most visually interesting areas. It can identify skin tones automatically and keep people from being squeezed out of the shot and selection tools let you easily define the most important areas before you begin scaling.

The original image.

Content-Aware Scaling allows the image to be re-adjusted without affecting key subject components in the picture.

Auto-Blend Layers enables a series of shots with different focus points to be combined to make an image with a wide depth-of-field.
The enhanced Auto-Blend Layers feature can be used to combine a series of shots with different focal points to automatically create a new, single image with a depth of field encompassing the entire series. You can even color-correct the images at the same time, automatically. Photoshop CS4 also introduces a revolutionary new Rotate View tool that lets you nondestructively spin your canvas to any orientation you desire. Selections, grids, rulers and other tools and features are adjusted automatically to match your chosen orientation.

The Rotate View tool allows the canvas to be turned non-destructively to any orientation.
A new Pixel Grid function leverages the power of your GPU with OpenGL technology to zoom right down to pixel level. This enables users to easily edit images at the highest magnification and makes navigating very large images much easier. You can also “toss” the image across the screen with the Hand tool-the physics engine in Photoshop CS4 will give you a natural pan in any direction.

Pixel-level editign is made easy and fast with the new Pixel Grid function.
Closer integration with Adobe Bridge CS4 makes it easier to work with all imaging assets. Tighter integrations is also provided with Photoshop Lightroom, with improved cross-application support for automated functions, such as opening multiple photographs from Lightroom 2 directly into a layered Photoshop document, high dynamic range (HDR) image, panorama, or Smart Object. Lightroom 2 and Adobe Camera Raw also share the same underlying technology, which means the changes you make with Camera Raw 5 in Photoshop CS4 are recognised in Lightroom 2, and vice versa.
With Photoshop CS4 Extended, you can now work with 3D models as easily and powerfully as you can 2D images, without navigating dialog boxes and special layer contents. In addition, an expanded Count tool allows fast and simple, point-and-click tallying of objects in scientific images. Smart Object layers support nondestructive scaling and transformation of Photoshop layers. With Photoshop CS4, you can now apply perspective transformations to Smart Objects, work with linked layer masks, and use the new Eyedropper tool option to sample either the current layer or all of the layers in the Smart Object at once.
Creative Pro Online Services provides Photoshop CS4 users with built-in access to a world of online resources, including online help, screen sharing and colour consultation. With Adobe Community Help, you can find the focused answers you need, fast, simply by choosing Help > Photoshop Help (Internet connection required). For full details of Photoshop CS4 go to www.adobe.com/au and click on the Products tab. A trial version can be obtained by clicking on the Downloads tab.