But its role is far more important than just offering convenience: Effects initiated through this palette apply as adjustment layers, so any edits you make are nondestructive to the original image. The feature doesn’t always work perfectly–I found that expanding the canvas size caused tiling of the background elements–but it’s still an awesome tool to have.Ī new adjustments palette (see the image in the gallery above) contains many often-used photo enhancements that you’d usually have to dig into a menu for. In the example I’ve provided (see the images in the gallery above), resizing with the traditional method would have made the people in the foreground unrealistically skinny with context-aware scaling, the vinyl character in the back shrank, but the people remained the same size. Usually when you rescale an image, all elements in the image resize proportionally–and in the process, some elements warp or squash when they shouldn’t. The most gee-whiz update is the new context-sensitive scaling, which allows you to resize pictures while retaining foreground objects’ scale. Of course, the added under-the-hood elements aren’t the only updates in Photoshop CS4. I got to watch a dialog box for a coffee-break-length period when I asked Photoshop to apply a simple monochrome gradient to my 5.6GB file.

And even a system with lots of RAM won’t be able to avoid reading and writing data to your hard disk–a process that still proves time-consuming. Running the 64-bit version will provide little performance benefit other than the ability to address more RAM. For people who do work on very large images, it’s probably more cost-effective to buy more RAM for your PC than to buy large RAID systems, and Photoshop will probably perform better. Adobe says that Photoshop keeps its editing history in RAM for as long as possible, too, so even if you’re working with smaller images but making lots of edits to them, allocating more RAM will help you in that situation as well. Obviously, most people don’t need that sort of capability, but many professional photographers shoot with large- or medium-format cameras with digital backs that can capture nearly 40 megapixels or even higher, and they often create much larger compositions. In the 64-bit version, I was able to create and work with an image of 45,000 pixels by 45,000 pixels, for a total of a little over 2000 megapixels and a 5.6GB file size. The amounts will vary depending on your system, especially your graphics card. I was able to set the 64-bit version to take up 6879MB of RAM, and to set the 32-bit version to consume 3185MB of RAM. Photoshop requires that you manually allocate a specific amount of RAM to it, rather than its acquiring the RAM on the fly. I tested betas of both the 32- and 64-bit versions of Photoshop CS4 by installing them on a workstation with dual Intel Xeon CPUs, running Windows Vista 64-bit and 8GB of RAM.

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