Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended for Mac Review

Photoshop is without a doubt a big fish and the leading image editing software on the market. While other companies just try to create competitors, Adobe releases new and new updates, making it’s almost impossible to find a better tool for professional designers, photographers, illustrators, digital artists an many other specialists.

When new version of Photoshop appears users starts wondering whether it’s worth upgrading or no. If you ask the same question, this review will be definitely useful for you.

The first thing you’ll notice when you start new Photoshop CS4 Extended is rebuilt interface. I must say new interface is more Windows like as windows can be manipulated with the help of tabs. Although Mac users may not be happy with this update at a glance, it’s very comfortable indeed and within a couple of weeks of usage you won’t even think of return. Tabs system performs great when you need to work with multiple documents.

Another wonderful improvement concerns nonmodal color corrections and masking palettes. Now when you want to use Curves control, all you need to do is to select it and then drag the controls to mini Curves dialog you can find in color correction panel. This small updates actually helps a lot during work. A selection of nondestructive Masks allow fast adjusting size, softness and transparency of layer masks without affecting original mask’s sharpness.

Smart Objects are now even smarter than ever. They now have layer masks and can be edited with all your favorite tools like Perspective, Skew, Scale and Distort.

Adobe hasn’t forgotten photographers who can benefit from a series of updates like Context-Sensitive Scaling. This option is simply irreplaceable when you need to stretch your images (this is a common situation for creating many commercial images and layouts). Context Sensitive Scaling automatically stretches background areas without many details, ex. sky, water or grass. At the same time foreground elements (cars, faces, people) unchanged. Previous Dodge and Burning tool got awfully looking results from time to time, upsetting its users. This tool works much better.

Camera Raw also has some new features like nondestructive exposure, color correction and Lightroom’s gradient.

Extended version has some updates that you won’t see in a regular version. This is newly rebuilt 3D menu that allows sophisticated editing. It includes 3D image manipulation like mapping images onto 3D objects, painting on 3D objects, distorting on 3D surfaces and performing other actions. With all this the final result shows very nice rendering quality. Certainly, serious specialists in 3D may say these functions are nothing new, so those users who are into serious 3D work may use other programs with dedicated modeling, sophisticated animation programs and rendering. All others may find Photoshop Extended really worth closest attention as built-in 3D tools help successfully coping with vast majority of tasks with 3D.

There’s only one negative point in Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended – there’s no 64-bit version. This is quite strange as Windows version is 64-bit. Overall Photoshop CS4 is a well done program that already has its own army of fans and this release proves Adobe cares about its customers, trying to release really quality products that keep up with latest trends in the IT industry.

System Requirements: G5 or Intel Processor, at least 512 MB RAM (1GB is recommended), Mac OS 10.4.11 or higher, Internet connection for authorization purposes.

Also check out: Adobe Premiere CS3, Encore CS3 and SoundBooth CS3 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS4