Software: Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended Review

SPACIOUS: Photoshop CS4's new interface is geared towards
maximising your workspace, for example, by doing away with
the Windows Title bar and merging some menu items together.

Taking an already extensive and powerful photo editing tool and making it better is a tall order and yet Adobe has done it withPhotoshop CS4 Extended.

When you look at the market for photo editing software, there’s really nothing that comes even close to Adobe’s Photoshop in terms of power and versatility.

I’ve tried others, like the open-source GIMP, but I always keep coming back to Photoshop.

The one thing about Photoshop though, is that if you don’t have any grounding or help in using the software, it’s really quite difficult to just pick up and use — I blame it on the fact that the software originally began life on Apple’s Macintosh computers, which require you to know many keyboard shortcuts.

With the Photoshop CS4 Extended, Adobe is taking a few steps to rectify this situation, although it still has to be familiar to the core professional users which I think make up most of its customers.

Of course, being easier to use is not the only thing Creative Suite 4 has — the suite features more stuff than ever before and the full package comes jam-packed with so much that it’ll make your head spin.

In fact, the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection I got has added loads of other applications as well, including colour calibration software and even video editing tools, which are beyond my core competence.

Even if I could review them, they would take up all the pages of this newspaper to cover it. Therefore, I’ll just concentrate on Photoshop CS4and its changes since the last version.

The interface

One complaint I had with the previous iteration of Photoshop was that the interface was apparently designed for larger widescreen monitors and the toolboxes and the way they were displayed really took up a lot of space on older 17in monitors.

Well, I’m happy to report that Adobe seems to have realised this andPhotoshop CS4 has done a few things to maximise viewing space for your images.

One such change is that much like Google Chrome, Photoshop CS4 for Windows has done away with the Windows Title Bar (the one that usually shows the title of the program at one end, and the minimise, maximise and close buttons at the other) and integrated some common Photoshoptools into the Menu bar (the one that has File, Open, etc) below it.

This doesn’t sound like a lot but coupled with a few changes to the toolbars and dock, it does gain you a quite a bit of viewing area for your images.

Another tweak to the interface is that multiple open image files are now ordered tabs instead of floating windows.

Some users may not like this, but I personally found it a good feature as it makes it easier to switch between different open files and compare them, especially when you have a particular zoom level set.

Floating windows tended to obscure other windows behind them and this wasn’t so great when you have to quickly switch between them.

Although it appeared in previous versions of Photoshop before, the Workspaces option on the top right hand corner of Photoshop CS4 has been improved.

It now not only displays different tools in workspace, but menu items only show the relevant tools for the current workspace.

This makes for a much cleaner (and more customisable) interface — of course, hidden items can be shown again with a simple mouse click.

I work with Adjustment Layers a lot — it’s one of the most powerful features in Photoshop’s arsenal and allows you to make selective and reversible adjustments to your image (such as Levels, Saturation, etc) and apply them in layers.

While previous versions of Photoshop had you double-click on an Adjustment Layer to bring up the settings menu of that layer, Photoshop CS4 now puts it front and centre, with each Adjustment Layer having its settings displayed in the Photoshop Panel (the toolbox on the right) as its own tab.

SEAMLESS PANORAMA: Although not new inPhotoshop CS4, the
Photomerge has been made even better with more advanced
automated analysis and blending.

Although this feature isn’t new in Photoshop CS4, it’s also worth mentioning that since Photoshop CS3, the automated Photomerge feature to create panoramic images has become an extremely powerful tool.

Using Photomerge, Photoshop CS4 (and CS3) can examine shots and blend them together into a seamless panorama, even managing to recognise when elements such as people have moved from frame to frame and then stitching the images together so that each person appears only once in the final image.

Photoshop CS4 has added even better vignetting and geometric distortion correction plus the ability to more easily create 360 panoramas so this feature is even more powerful than before.

If you thought making 360° panoramas was cool, Photoshop CS4 has a new feature which will allow you to merge several photos together of the same subject but with different focal points into a single photo with extended depth of field.

For example, if you’re shooting a close up of an object, but find that the area of focus is really very shallow, Photoshop CS4 allows you to shoot a number of shots, each focussing on a different area and merge them all using the Auto-Align and Auto-Blend into a single photo with extended depth of field.

Adobe Bridge

Adobe Bridge CS4, the file browsing and management application that comes with Creative Suite 4, has had a couple of tweaks as well.

Ever since Creative Suite 3, Bridge looks a lot like Adobe Lightroom and has workspaces which allow you to switch between a maximised thumbnail view, metadata editing, light table view amongst others.

MORE DEPTH: Photoshop CS4's Merge and Blend allows you to
blend several shots of the same subject with different focal
points into one photo with extended depth-of-field.

Bridge CS4 adds a new Output workspace which adds controls for creating PDF contact sheets or a web photo gallery.

I’ve also noticed that startup and display of thumbnails is noticeably faster compared with previous versions, which is good, because browsing was pretty slow on Bridge CS3.

Oh yes, Bridge CS4 can even automatically order your photos in the Collections menu, based on certain criteria that you set.

One of the more unusual and interesting ones is an Auto-collect feature that will have Bridge CS4 analyse images in a particular folder and pick out images that could be grouped together to be used for a HDR (High Dynamic Range) image or stitched together to make a panorama.

This is particularly useful for me as I do shoot a lot of images specially for stitching into panoramic images, and although slow, the Auto-collect feature does help to pick out those images from a list of sometimes hundreds of photos that I usually have after a trip.

Camera RAW

Adobe has also updated the Camera RAW, the application that allows you to open and edit RAW image files from practically all camera brands.

Camera RAW in Creative Suite 4 has had various changes, mostly to come up to the same level as the Lightroom RAW editor.

One of the more interesting features is the ability to make localised adjustments to the RAW image — you just click on a point in the image you want to make a localised adjustment to and then adjust the sliders, which will only affect the area you selected.

These changes are of course non-destructive and can be reversed at any time.

There is even a pretty nifty spot removal tool which seems to be more intuitive than the main Photoshop CS4 Spot Healing Tool.

Hardware acceleration

One of the major new features of Photoshop CS4 for me is that for the first time, it takes advantage of the GPU (i.e. your graphics card) to perform some tasks.

The most obvious change with GPU acceleration is when you zoom in and out of your images (using the Ctrl and - key or + key) you get a completely smooth zoom.

In previous non-hardware accelerated versions of Photoshop, what you get when you zoom in and out was a wire frame that reflected how large or small or your next image is going to be. With Photoshop CS4, you can see the zoom happen as soon as you press the key combination.

Similarly, panning pictures works much like in an iPod touch/iPhone — if you have the Hand tool enabled, you can grab hold of an image and flick it any direction you want, and the image will pan smoothly and come to a stop depending on how aggressively you moved the image.

SPEEDY: One of the more major changes in Adobe Bridge is that
 the application launches faster and displays thumbnails faster too.

There is another new little trick made possible by GPU acceleration.

When you hold down the H key together with the left mouse button,Photoshop CS4 will quickly zoom out to show you the entire image, and moving your cursor to any part of the image and then letting go the H key will get you back to the zoom level you were at before, but this time to where your cursor was pointing at.

A similar sleight of hand can be performed by holding down the R key and the left mouse button, which allows you to rotate your image to any angle for easier viewing. The rotation here is not permanent and is meant to make it easier to make a selection, for example. Any changes done will be saved, except for this arbitrary rotation.

It all sounds flashy, but believe me, it really makes working with images much easier, especially when, for example, you’re making a selection using the marquee tool.

Conclusion

As usual, every new generation of Photoshop puts the software even further ahead of its rivals, and Photoshop CS4 Extended is no exception.

While probably not revolutionary, Photoshop CS4 has hundreds of little tweaks and interface changes that together make up for quite a lot.

I for one, am very happy with how Adobe has concentrated on maximising the viewing space and still have all the important tools at your fingertips, something which I feel Creative Suite 3 had really taken a step backwards with in its panels and toolbox design.

In fact, there are so many little changes in Photoshop CS4 I have only barely scratched the surface of the number of new features you can find in it.

Of course, being that the software costs USD799.75 it’s probably not worth upgrading to if you’re a casual user who already has Photoshop CS3, but for an imaging professional, this is certainly a worthy upgrade.

Pros: GPU acceleration; improved menus; lots of small tweaks and new features.

Cons: Pricey.

Manufacturer: Adobe Systems Inc

System requirements: 1.8GHz processor or faster, 512MB RAM, 1GB HDD space, 1,024 x768-pixels display, 16-bit video card with OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0 (or newer), QuickTime 7.2, Internet connection required.

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Software: Apple iLife ‘09 Review

PICTURE THIS: Faces is a new function in iPhoto that allows you
to view the pictures of all your friends and family at a glance.

Apple iLife ‘09’s fancy features promises to make working with images and videos a breeze.

Announced at this year’s Macworld, iLife ‘09’s new flashy features caught the attention of the Mac community.

Although it wasn’t as groundbreaking as most Mac fans were hoping for, it still has a few impressive features such as face recognition for photos and image stabilisation for videos.

For the purpose of the review, I will mainly focus on the new features of iPhoto ‘09 and iMovie ‘09.

Finding faces

Two main features of iPhoto are Faces and Places which further enhance Events, a function introduced in an earlier version, which automatically sorts photos by the date it was shot.

Faces is an easy way to organise photos and it uses face recognition to identify faces that you have tagged, allowing you to compile a list of photos with a particular person.

The feature is pretty easy to use — you just have to just click on the Name Faces button to start a simple face selection tool that is somewhat similar to Facebook’s.

iPhoto can also scan a photo to detect faces though it sometimes misses a face or two so you will have to select them manually.

You only have to name and tag two pictures and iPhoto will sniff out your entire library of photos for the person and it mostly gets it right even when the photo is blurry.

It works surprisingly well for group photos when everyone is facing the camera and it makes quick work of naming multiple subjects.

However, you may have to wait for a few minutes for the program to scan through your photo library the first time you use it.

iPhoto’s face detection system doesn’t get it right all the time. It is a hit and miss affair and is easily thrown off by people wearing sunglasses and caps.

HIT AND MISS: The face detection algorithm for Faces 
occasionally goofs up and detects non-human objects, such 
as the cushion in the picture above, as a face.

Oddly enough, the face detection algorithm occasionally detects non-human objects as faces in photos. In one instance, the program thought a pattern on a pillow case was a human face.

Admittedly, Faces is still a feature that will come in handy when you have to browse and tag thousands of holiday photos.

Keeping track

Places uses geotags to group photos by the place it was taken and marks them on a map. For the uninitiated, geotags contain geographical metadata such as latitude and longitude coordinates.

iPhoto extensively uses Google maps and has a good user interface that easily allows you to browse locations by country, state, city and street address.

When you import images with geotag data, Places will automatically place them on a map. But if your photos doesn’t have geotag data, you can still manually pin the location of your photo on the map.

However, this method can be tedious because you have to manually search for the location for each photo.

Also, despite having a built-in Google search bar for looking up addresses, Places sometimes failed to locate places I searched.

Places is a cool way to catalogue a trip by location but many users may not find it useful because the majority of consumer cameras don’t have GPS capability.

Moving on, the Slideshow feature in iPhoto is good for making a quick photo presentation.

While the options are basic at best — there are a limited number of themes and transition effects — but is still quite impressive and you can even assign background music to go with the slideshow.

Making movies

It isn’t often that you can find a video editing tool that is not only easy to use but also powerful.

iMovie has all these qualities and it is amazing how it can help you slap together a decent video without having to dig out the manual.

EASY-TO-USE: iMovie retains the same user interface though it
now comes with a few nifty new features like
image stabilization and precision editing.

I was immediately impressed by the easy-to-use user interface.

Most of iMovie’s operations are completely drag-and-drop based so putting together a stream of videos is a simple matter of dragging parts of the clip you want into the editing area and letting the program join them together.

Despite having almost no video editing knowledge, I was surprised at how easy it was to create a 24 second clip in iMovie.

Things just worked out as I began experimenting and slowly got the hang of incorporating features such as text and transition effects into my videos.

There are a couple of new features — image stabilisation and precision editor — that take iMovie to the next level.

Image stabilisation comes in handy when you have to salvage extremely shaky footage shot from, say, a moving vehicle.

It is resource intensive and may take several minutes to analyse a clip and apply the smoothening affect.

You get to pick the size of the area to apply image stabilisation and the smaller the area, the better the result you get.

The only drawback to this feature is that your clip may end up looking less refined but it’s better than not being able to save the entire clip.

And don’t expect it to perform miracles if there is excessive camera shake in the footage.

The precision editor is another improvement in iMovie that gives you more control over your videos as you can edit the transition between two clips frame by frame.

I found it to be a great tool when I needed to select a specific portion of a clip to cut off.

Other additions include new animated globe and map transition effects (a la Indiana Jones) that’s perfect for globe trotting holiday makers to depict the course of a journey.

It’s really a nice effect that adds a sense of style to your presentations.

While the additions give iMovie a few extra tools to work with, it isn’t a major improvement over its predecessor.

Also, the software is still weak in terms of audio editing as it doesn’t give you a lot of options to work with.

The inability to manually save your work is a little worrying as you can never be too sure if iMovie has been saving your work in case of a crash or power outage.

However, I have yet to encounter any problems with it and can only hope that iMovie saves your work progress often.

Creating and sharing

What’s the point of shooting photos and videos if you can’t share them with anyone?

iPhoto easily addresses this with a variety of different ways — you can show your photos to your friends and family by creating a photo book, calendar, slideshow or even a DVD.

Similarly, iMovie lets you share your videos by burning DVDs, exporting them to your iPod or uploading them directly to Youtube.

If you are into sharing photos online, you’ll love iPhoto ability to sync directly with Facebook and Flickr with just a click of the button.

Easily one of the coolest things about the Faces feature is how it exports tags in photos to Facebook and even matches it with people on your friend’s list.

Flickr users will also be pleased with iPhoto’s ability to sync geotag info with the online photo sharing site.

iPhoto also intelligently keeps your Flickr uploads in sync with your album so any images you delete will be reflected online as well.

Conclusion

The features introduced in iPhoto and iMovie really improve the overall appeal of iLife ‘09.

iPhoto addition of Faces and Places gives you a new avenue to sort and categorise your photos.

And creating slideshows has never been this easy or fun. I only wish there was more variety to the themes or there was a way to download more.

iMovie image stabilisation feature is great for saving shaky clips and precision editing gives more control over your videos.

However, while iMovie is an improvement over its predecessor, it’s still a consumer grade video editor that provides the basic tools

All in all, if you own a Mac and work with digital media often, iLife ‘09should serve as an easily accessible software suite for your photo management and video editing needs.

Pros: Faces and Places helpful for managing photos; easy to create slideshows; iMovie’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

Cons: Face recognition can be improved; Places interface a little clunky; audio editing in iMovie hasn’t improved.

Multimedia creation suite
Manufacturer: Apple Computer
System requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

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