Adobe Photoshop CS4 review

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.

Author: Tom Arah