Part 4: The final installment of our “What’s in Photoshop CS4″ Series
Jan. 16
2:11 am
Here’s the final part of our four-part series on “What’s in Photoshop CS4.” This last segment is kind of “rapid-fire” as we hit on a bunch of features, tweaks, and enhancements we hadn’t covered yet (but we darn sure weren’t going to do a Part 5). Hope you enjoy it.
Adobe Flash Required.
Thanks – I really enjoyed this, very informative. Time to order an upgrade.
A very helpful summery that you gave us!
Thanks
Thomas
i didnt get that with the hovering above a tab and then it switches.
if i want to drag a layer from the layerpanel from one image to another and i hover over the tab nothing happens.
Dragging layers to tabs does not work for me either. Since I am on a PC, I’m guessing that this behavior is only available on the Mac. That’s unfortunate, because it is extremely useful, and the workaround (changing the window layout, dragging, then changing it back) is a pain.
You have to have the move tool enabled to do this, just in case this wasn’t clear.
Wes
To Alex & BH,
Unfortunately, from what I understand you can only drag the object from the actual image area, NOT the layers panel. It sucks I know, that’s why I disabled the floating panels because I pretty much drag everything from my layers panel. Hope that helps. Hope they fix that….Adobe?
Thanks for all the work and time you guys spent on the summary videos. Cs4 does seem to be heading in the the right direction.
Even with all the new features of CS4 I still am sticking to my guns. Adobe has made me mad with there upgrade price structuring. I Bought cs3 extended. They announced cs4. They are giving the people who bought cs, cs2,cs3,cs3 extended the same upgrade price to cs4 extended. How is this fair to the peopel who paid extra for cs3 extended? Should we not have a slightly cheaper upgrade cost?
For this myself and many friends and fellow photogs have dropped adobe products all together and are using some competitors products.
Keep up the great work Scott and the NAPP crew.
I understand your frustration, but like it or not—you need to love Adobe if you do this as a job. Keep in mind that it’s usually around a 18 month upgrade cycle for these products so you really do need to be careful on when you buy the products because I see tons of people get outraged when they just bought a version and the next version soon comes out after, just keep that on mind. I’m guessing Spring / Summer 2010 they’ll announce CS5. This software / hardware industry is unfortunately not fair all the time because of constant progression, but seriously, think how BORING it would be if they were very slow to innovate….? People would be saying “Adobe Sucks, they haven’t changed Photoshop in forever, when can I delete multiple channels at the same time?”….. Hope that helps.
Steve, You hit the nail on the head. As a CS3 Extended owner I’ve questioned why Adobe wants me to pay for much of the same code all over again. As a Lightroom 2 user I’ve also questioned why Adobe expects me to pay the full upgrade price when I’ve already bought much of the ACR5 code with Lightroom 2. These type of pricing decisions are ones that are made by companies who have overwhelming control of a market. They then begin to think that they are so important that it doesn’t matter what customers think, they will buy the product regardless. Well guess what? This time the little ole customer has said enough and sales of CS4 have been a bust. Adobe has been forced to lay people off and some analyst are now questioning their ability to fend off a takeover by a larger corporation.
Adobe has taken this creative suite approach too far. While the integration of their various products has been a great idea the problem is that they have decided to upgrade all of the products at the same time. While some products need updating every 12 to 18 months other more mature applications such as Photoshop can easily go 24 to 30 months. By coming out with these “upgrades” too soon users suffer upgrade fatigue and stop shelling out the money.
Remember while $200 for the Photoshop sounds reasonable that’s just the beginning of the true cost of an upgrade. With each software upgrade comes the expense of the training upgrade. All of our old CS3 books, training DVDs, and past class training now drops in value because of differences in program functionality. When you add in the cost of upgrading your library of books and DVDs, the expense of training and the cost of the loss of ones time reading, watching and attending training you can see that true costs of upgrading far exceeds the value of a few new features for the great majority of users.
I love Scott and the folks at NAPP; they have taught me quite a lot over the last several years about Photoshop but I hope they don’t start putting all their eggs in the Adobe upgrade basket because for many of us 18 months is just too often to have to be retrained.
It’s interesting to hear everybody’s opinion on this. If you’re a “Hobbyist” I can see why some people wouldn’t bother with all these upgrades, if you’re a photographer or designer you can make anywhere from 40K to upwards of 120k+ doing this type of work—is spending say, $600 REALLY that bad every 18 months for something make you that much money….? There’s tons of training online that’s free, you don’t need to buy specific CS3, CS4 books in my opinion, once you learn the basics you can buy a magazine to find out the new features. I wouldn’t look at reading or going to any seminars as a waste of time and money, I’ll go to CS4 seminars and CS5 seminars and won’t look at the CS4 ones as a waste of my time. Welcome to the computer industry, it won’t change, we all need to get used to it. Personally with how competitive this industry is, I want any extra edge over the next person that I can get.
Awesome overview of features. As a photographer, I am glad I upgraded.
As a photographer what advantages do you find in CS4 that comes close to being value for money or particularly earth shattering? I am struggling to find anything!
Nick
I wonder if you watched the four videos that explained all the cool upgrades? If you have, and disagree with what these guys say, post it. But I am going to assume that you haven’t since you are asking a guy you’ll never meet why he justifies the price. Here you are, like you and your opinions are important or something, asking a guy to list EXACTLY what Scott, Dave, and Mike spent FOUR VIDEOS explaining. You just want to feel important “as a photographer”, by questioning another photographer’s opinion. Do you think your opinion outweighs the PHOTOSHOP GUYS?!?!? Feel free to disagree with them, but you are almost starting an arguement with a guy you don’t know. Sorry guys for this harsh post, but this person’s pretentious question really got under my skin. What a stupid question!!!
As a professional photographer, the advantage of CS4 is that it saves me time. Time is money, my time is very valuable. The less time I’m in Ps, the more time I have for shooting or being with my family. And the upgrade price is minimal to provide me that.
If you are struggling to find a reason to upgrade, then maybe you have a lot of spare time, or you don’t shoot very often, or just you just don’t use Ps much, then that is great…don’t upgrade.
Thanks to The Photoshop Guys for all you do!
I am a professional photographer and shoot daily. I am enrolled with Kelby Training and hold Scott and his team in high regard. These videos were fun but nothing new – been watching same on KT for weeks. Like Scott and many other high end photographers I find I spend around 90% of my time in Lightroom or Aperture. I use both. I save time by NOT needing to export to PS.
For those not familiar with English (It appears there are one or two), I merely stated that I did not think the upgrade was value for money and simply contained nothing compelling that would benefit my business. It would appear that around 85-90% of CS3 users think the same!
I may feel differently about CS5 – who knows?
So to reiterate, 85-90% of Nick’s cohorts (which includes only “decent” photographers…along with Scott Kelby!) spend at least 10-15% time of their professional photography time per day leaving comments or replies to 85-90% of those who think differently than him. Also, 85-90% of the time, Nick tries to get in the last word. This is, no doubt, effective in 5-10% of the 10-15% of his time he spends replying to posts with 85-90% irrelevant content.
Note: There is an 85-90% chance Nick will respond to this comment during the 10-15% of his professional photography day when he is scheduled to respond to forum posts with increasingly discursive comments.
Scott: This note is just a photo shoot reference to yesterday’s
USAir plane in the Hudson River that are exceptional shots I thought may be relevant as exceptional photojournalism to your blog:
web site http://www.palemale.com (click on Hudson air crash link). Talk about clarity of the photo!
Thanks, guys. So very helpful. I have now ordered CS4 and can’t wait to get started.
Phew, I need the help. Thanks every bit helps and I’m a true advocate for this site now.
Thanks
I haven’t had a chance to upgrade yet but I’m sure I will before the month is over.