~Photoshop CS4~

When you look at the market for photo editing software, there’s really nothing that comes even close to Adobe’s Photoshop in terms of power and versatility.

One thing about Photoshop though, is that if you don’t have any grounding or help in using the software, it’s really quite difficult to just pick up and use

With the Photoshop CS4 Extended, Adobe is taking a few steps to rectify this situation, although it still has to be familiar to the core professional users which I think make up most of its customers.

Of course, being easier to use is not the only thing Creative Suite 4 has — the suite features more stuff than ever before and the full package comes jam-packed with so much that it’ll make your head spin.

In fact, the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection we got has added loads of other applications as well, including colour calibration software and even video editing tools, which are beyond my core competence.

Even if I could review them, they would take up all the pages of this newspaper to cover it. Therefore, I’ll just concentrate on Photoshop CS4 and its changes since the last version.


The previous iteration of Photoshop was that the interface was apparently designed for larger widescreen monitors and the toolboxes and the way they were displayed really took up a lot of space on older 17in monitors.

Well, I’m happy to report that Adobe seems to have realised this and Photoshop CS4 has done a few things to maximise viewing space for your images.


This doesn’t sound like a lot but coupled with a few changes to the toolbars and dock, it does gain you a quite a bit of viewing area for your images.

Another tweak to the interface is that multiple open image files are now ordered tabs instead of floating windows.

Some users may not like this, but I personally found it a good feature as it makes it easier to switch between different open files and compare them, especially when you have a particular zoom level set.

Floating windows tended to obscure other windows behind them and this wasn’t so great when you have to quickly switch between them.

Although it appeared in previous versions of Photoshop before, the Workspaces option on the top right hand corner of Photoshop CS4 has been improved.

It now not only displays different tools in workspace, but menu items only show the relevant tools for the current workspace.

This makes for a much cleaner (and more customisable) interface — of course, hidden items can be shown again with a simple mouse click.

I work with Adjustment Layers a lot — it’s one of the most powerful features in Photoshop’s arsenal and allows you to make selective and reversible adjustments to your image (such as Levels, Saturation, etc) and apply them in layers.

While previous versions of Photoshop had you double-click on an Adjustment Layer to bring up the settings menu of that layer, Photoshop CS4 now puts it front and centre, with each Adjustment Layer having its settings displayed in the Photoshop Panel (the toolbox on the right) as its own tab.


Although this feature isn’t new in Photoshop CS4, it’s also worth mentioning that since Photoshop CS3, the automated Photomerge feature to create panoramic images has become an extremely powerful tool.

Photoshop CS4 (and CS3) can examine shots and blend them together into a seamless panorama, even managing to recognise when elements such as people have moved from frame to frame and then stitching the images together so that each person appears only once in the final image.

Photoshop CS4 has added even better vignetting and geometric distortion correction plus the ability to more easily create 360 panoramas so this feature is even more powerful than before.

If you thought making 360° panoramas was cool, Photoshop CS4 has a new feature which will allow you to merge several photos together of the same subject but with different focal points into a single photo with extended depth of field.