CS4

I have been looking at Adobe Photoshop CS4 and I must say, I am really impressed by what I see. It is a huge huge upgrade over CS3. I will talk about some features that really interests me.

Firstly, it is reported to be much faster than CS3. That alone is immensely important. The loading time for CS3 is really crappy. Coupled with the time taken to open files and save documents.

Secondly, there is this feature called "Content-aware Scaling". This feature allows the user to scale the background, without affecting the main subject much. For example, I have a picture of a cactus in a desert. I can scale the desert to any ratio without making it look weird. I cannot, on the other hand, do the same with the cactus. In the past, I would have to cut the cactus onto another layer and do the scaling. Now, Photoshop does it for me.

Thirdly, the panoramic stitching and tone mapping features are much better.

Lastly, is a feature listed as "Extended Depth-of-Field". This is the feature that I am most excited about. It allows one to create a single shot, from a series of shots that are focused on different point in the frame. This allows the creation of an image that is sharp front-to-back without stopping down the lens, losing sharpness in the process...

Pity my computer is unable to support it at the moment.