PK Designers

Adobe Photoshop CS4

Photoshop CS3 had some mixed reviews. It didn’t have quite as many features of interest to photographers as say, previous versions of the program. I think such responses may also have been influenced by the introduction of Lightroom 1, which was definitely designed with photographers in mind. It is probably fair to say that there was a certain amount of envy among the Photoshop team to the ‘new kid on the block’. Well, Photoshop CS4 has arrived, hot on the heels of Lightroom 2 and it’s time to see how the new version of the ‘mother ship’ program shapes up.
As far as Photoshop CS4 itself goes, I think photographers will be very pleased with some the new changes here. Photoshop now has a smart dark gray interface and adopted a task-based approach to image editing and this can be seen in the way image adjustments are now accessible within their own panel. When you combine this with the ability to non-destuctively edit a layer mask, you’ll discover that the  Photoshop CS4 image editing system offers the most flexible yet for pixel image editing.
The new CS4 interface
The most noticeable changes are in the interface design appearance. The panels can be docked within an application frame window as shown below in Figure 1 (although it is easy enough to revert to the floating panel and document window behavior). There are some nice touches to the UI design, such as the way you can  easily access different workspace settings from the new application bar at the top. I am not so keen on the all-caps panel headers, but if you set the interface preferences to Small UI, you are unlikely to be bothered much by this particular cross-product change in the UI design.

Figure 1. This shows the new Photoshop CS4 Application window program workspace for the Mac OS, showing the Window menu that allows you to switch between the classic mode workspace and Application Frame workspace shown here.