Sunday, October 19, 2008

Photoshop

Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current and primary market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems. It has been described as "an industry standard for graphics professionals" and was one of the early "killer applications" on Macintosh.

Photoshop CS4, the current eleventh iteration of the program, was officially announced on 23 September 2008 and released on 15 October 2008. "CS" reflects its integration with other Creative Suite products, and the number "4" represents it as the fourth version released since Adobe re-branded its products under the CS umbrella. Photoshop CS4 features additions such as the ability to paint directly on 3D models, wrap 2D images around 3D shapes, convert gradient maps to 3D objects, add depth to layers and text, get print-quality output with the new ray-tracing rendering engine, and enjoy exporting to supported common 3D formats; the new Adjustment and Mask Panels; Content-aware scaling (previously known as seam carving); Fluid Canvas Rotation and File display options . On 30 April, Adobe released Photoshop CS3 Extended, which includes all the same features of Adobe Photoshop CS3 with the addition of capabilities for scientific imaging, 3D, and high end film and video users. The successor to Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS4, is the first 64-bit Photoshop on consumer computers.

Adobe Creative Suite is a collection of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications made by Adobe Systems. The latest version, Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4), was announced on September 23, 2008 as the successor to Adobe Creative Suite 3. It was officially released on October 15, 2008.

All applications in CS4 feature the same user interface, with a new tabbed interface for working with concurrently running Adobe CS4 programs where multiple applications can be opened inside multiple tabs contained in a single window. It was announced that nVidia CUDA technology is now supported to allow for the accelerated encoding of video.

Adobe CS4 is also developed to perform better under 64-bit and multi-core processors. Adobe Photoshop CS4, Adobe After Effects CS4, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, and Adobe Soundbooth CS4 will officially support 64-bit. However, Adobe CS4 64-bit will not be available for Mac OS X. In early testing of 64-bit support in Adobe Photoshop CS4, overall performance gains ranged from 8% to 12%. Those who work with extremely large files may realize noticeably greater gains in performance, in some cases as dramatic as ten times the previous speed. This is because 64-bit applications can address larger amounts of memory and thus result in less file swapping — one of the biggest factors that can affect data processing speed.