Product Reviews

Adobe Photoshop is universally recognised as the most powerful photo-editor available, but Adobe isn't resting on its laurels. With Photoshop CS4, it has made the best even better.

As always with new launches, this starts with the interface, which has been reworked to make the absolute most of your screen real estate. The big changes are new self-adjusting docker panels, easily selectable document tabs and the removal of Windows' wasteful Title bar (though its absence takes a while to get used to). In its place Photoshop CS4 adds a new Application bar alongside the existing Menu bar. This provides instant access to zoom controls, the new Workspace switcher, a range of new workspace presets and the Arrange Documents dropdown, where you can quickly choose from a selection of window layouts.

Bridging the gap

Photoshop CS4's Application Bar also provides quick access to the separate Bridge CS4 application for asset management. With its new Workspace switcher, presets, search capabilities and Path bar for hard disk management, Bridge CS4 has been significantly improved and is a serious bonus across all the Creative Suite bundles and most of the CS4 apps.

Bridge CS4 is particularly important for Photoshop users as it makes a natural partner for visually managing files and offers some dedicated tools. Select multiple panorama shots, for instance, then the PhotoMerge command and Photoshop automatically uses new vignetting and geometric distortion corrections to offer highly effective blending of frame edges.

The same Auto-Align and Auto-Blend processing engine can also now be used to enhance the depth of field and tonal range for bracketed shots of the same image. In each case, inspecting the layer blends shows that Photoshop does a lot to get the best out of your images.

Bridge CS4 has just as much to offer when opening single standalone images into Photoshop, allowing you to open them in the dedicated Camera Raw 5 utility. Here it provides access to a wealth of powerful colour-correction tools, with all changes in Camera Raw 5 now recognised in Lightroom 2 and vice versa. Camera Raw 5 also adds the ability to localise adjustments to particular areas of the image with its new Adjustment Brush, which creates non-destructive and re-editable masks.

As its name suggests, Camera Raw 5 really comes into its own with unprocessed, camera raw formats, but it also provides similar non-destructive editing of TIFFs and JPEGs.

Non-destructive editing

It's the sort of capability that might have put Photoshop to shame in the past, but that's not the case here. The core focus of the improvements in Photoshop CS4 lies in a complete overhaul of its image-adjustment capabilities, placing the focus on similar non-destructive editing.

A new Adjustments panel provides instant, icon-based access to each layer type; there are 15 in all, including a new Vibrance option, which offers greater control over colour saturation

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while preserving delicate tones such as skin colours. Below the generic icons, Photoshop CS4 also provides access to a list of presets for the main adjustments, meaning that you can quickly add layers to increase contrast, lighten shadows, boost red and so on.

And where in the past adjustment layers were first defined and later refined in their own dialogs - powerful but awkward and off-putting - with CS4, whenever you add an adjustment or click on it in the Layers panel, its settings automatically appear in the Adjustment panel ready for editing. Switch to the Color and Tone workspace, which stacks the Histogram, Adjustments and Layers panels above each other, and you have an efficient centralised control panel for live fine-tuning every aspect of your image. It's simply superb.

Photoshop CS4 takes this new ability further for the two most important and powerful adjustments. Both the Curves and Hue/Saturation adjustments now offer on-image control. With the Curves panel, you click anywhere on an image to select a tone then drag the mouse up and down to brighten/darken it. With Hue/Saturation, clicking selects a colour range, while dragging left de-saturates and right boosts it. Meanwhile, Ctrl-dragging shifts hue. This is another feature borrowed from Lightroom, and it makes advanced tone and colour control intuitive and enjoyable.

Fine-tuning

Photoshop CS4's new adjustment layer handling is great for global colour correction of the image as a whole, but often you'll want to limit an adjustment to a particular area or colour range. To do this you have to create a layer mask. Again, it's a process that used to be difficult and, again, Photoshop CS4 has reinvented it. Using the new Masks panel you can quickly add both pixel and vector masks, invert them, change their density and feathering and call up the Refine Mask command for close control of edges and size.

The strength of the mask-based approach to local adjustments is that everything remains fine-tunable. Often, however, you'll actually want to get in and change the pixel values permanently. And, despite its new non-destructive focus, Photoshop CS4 hasn't forgotten its retouching responsibilities. The core Dodge, Burn and Sponge retouch tools have been reworked to preserve tonal quality and produce more natural-looking results. The Clone Stamp and Healing Brush have also been revamped and provide a cursor preview so you get a much better idea of the effect the tool will produce.

It's not just the tools that have been enhanced: Photoshop CS4's whole approach to direct pixel editing has been streamlined and made more productive. You can now interactively and quickly resize your brush onscreen and change its hardness. You can temporarily switch to a different tool by holding down its shortcut key - especially useful when changing zoom level or panning. And when navigating around your image like this, Photoshop CS4 provides hardware-accelerated zoom capabilities on all OpenGL-based systems - this makes the whole process completely smooth.

Highlights

Photoshop CS4 also provides one real jaw-dropper with its new Content Aware Image Scaling. Using this, you can drag to resize your image in real time and, while you do so, Photoshop CS4 automatically removes just the 'uninteresting' areas. When you first see this, the effect is magical, leaving you wondering just how Photoshop pulled it off. In fact, as with all Photoshop's power, it comes down to analysing and manipulating pixel values.

But Photoshop CS4's real magic is the way that it has reworked its whole approach to photo editing, allowing you to get the absolute best out of all images. That's an impressive feat considering that it wasn't exactly bad at that in the first place.