Photoshop 4 review

It's been nearly two years since the last major release of Photoshop. In the intervening time, plenty has happened. Windows 95 arrived and opened up the whole field of 32-bit processing, and a number of Adobe's competitors have stepped in to bring out advanced versions of their photo-editing applications.

In spite of the threat offered by programs such as Macromedia's xRes, Fractal Design's Painter, Corel's PhotoPaint, Micrografx's Picture Publisher and Ulead's PhotoImpact, the old giant has so far managed to maintain a near stranglehold of the PC market. However, a muted discontent has started rumbling among existing users and a great deal rides on version 4.

Background changes

Some of the biggest changes in the latest Photoshop have been made behind the scenes. Although there's still a version of the program that can be run under Windows 3.1 for backwards compatibility, for Windows 95 and NT the code has gone entirely 32-bit native which leads to a slight general speed increase for all operations. Since the difference is especially noticeable when zooming, scrolling and moving selections, it looks like work has also been done on cacheing the screen view. Even so, for the general user the difference isn't spectacular and certainly less than that between version 2.5 and 3.

For power users, however, two further changes promise great things. The support for symmetric multiprocessing means that machines with multiple processors can divide up the number crunching so that a machine with two processors will be twice as fast as a machine with one. As Windows NT becomes the platform of choice for power-hungry PC users, this will make a real difference. Don't rush out and upgrade just yet, however, as it's well worth waiting for MMX-enabled chips to become available. Photoshop 4's support for these multimedia extensions should see further gains of between 200 and 600 per cent on processor-intensive chores such as applying filters.

When the program is up and running, the most obvious changes are the addition of new Navigator and Action palettes, otherwise everything looks pretty familiar. Closer inspection, however, reveals a number of subtle but important changes to the interface. The main toolbox has been rationalised, bringing in the pen tools that used to be found on the separate Paths palette, and it now offers a new polygonal selection tool. A major boon for beginners is the introduction of Tooltips, which reveal what each tool is when you hold the mouse over it.

Another import from the Windows 95 way of doing things is the use of the right mouse button to call up a context-sensitive menu of relevant commands. With the paint tool selected, for example, right-clicking enables the current brush or the way it interacts with the underlying image to be changed.

When implemented comprehensively, the use of these context-sensitive commands can become an efficient way of running the program as a whole, without the need for intensive mouse work. Sadly, Photoshop 4's implementation is half-hearted, with most options still only available by searching through the main menus and on-screen palettes.

This is typical of Photoshop's general approach to usability. Little attempt has been made to make the working environment transparent to the beginner or occasional user. To take one example, when creating a selection with the lasso tool you have to hold down the key to add to the selection or the key to subtract from it. This is currently only explained in the manuals or through the help file, but with a context-sensitive toolbar, these options could be seen clearly and set easily.