Studio 6 Design Company

by CR Artist

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended + Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0 buy cheap

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended + Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0 buy cheap

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended. Every time we peel the wrapper on a fresh edition of Photoshop, we wonder how Adobe can possibly improve this stellar image editor. And as always, we were captivated by the powerful performance enhancements, wealth of nondestructive editing features, numerous tool tweaks, and an improved interface that helps reduce panel clutter.

Like the other CS4 components, Photoshop sports tabbed documents for easy document switching. Common tools, such as rotate and zoom, are now accessible via the main toolbar. The panel area can shrink down to a quick-access panel, but the little sidebar that contained Settings, Type, Layer Comps, and History is, well, history. You can, however, add these functions to a panel if you use them frequently.

We fired up CS4 with our pen tablet and were amused by the new rotation capability, which lets you revolve your image to any angle. If you have a graphics card that supports OpenGL, you can also scroll with a single gesture. However, some of the new interactive features don’t require a tablet. You can zoom and resize brushes on the fly using Control (Command on the Mac) and the right mouse button. Holding down the Alt key (or Option on the Mac) and dragging will feather the brush edges, too.

Our favorite new feature is the Adjustments panelâ??a potpourri of settings that formerly resided in the Image/Adjustments menu. The panel holds tools for Curves, Levels, Photo Filter and so on, all of which add nondestructive adjustment layers to your image. The layers can be rearranged, turned on and off, or discarded entirely. And you can create your own presets to add to the ones provided in the panel.

If you are a chronic masker, the new Masks panel is convenient for making both pixel and vector selections. This panel has sliders for adjusting feathering and density, as well.

The sexiest new feature in CS4 is Content-Aware Scaling, which alters image proportions without affecting the contents of the image itself. For example, suppose you have a portrait image that you want to resize for use in a landscape calendar template. By choosing Content-Aware Scaling, Photoshop will magically adjust the image size without distorting the visual content. This feature worked surprisingly well, but we had the best results with images that had a small focal area surrounded by lots of background.

Several tools have been enhanced for better performance. Both the Clone and the Healing Brush will now show a preview of the pixels that will be cloned. And the Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools are much more responsive. Auto-Align and Auto-Blend now work with much better fidelityâ??there is considerable reduction of depth-of-field, pincushion, and barrel distortion, plus smoother color blendingâ??all of which contributes to CS4′s virtually seamless panoramas.

Other powerful improvements include better camera RAW support; a much improved print engine with enhanced support for common printers; a soft-proofing preview, complete with out-of gamut colors inside the print dialog box; and some nice tweaks to the Adobe Bridge file manager. For example, you can now create and print Web galleries directly from Bridge, and you can view and sort on metadata tags.

If you use 64-bit Windows and OpenGL, CS4 is a must-have upgrade. The 64-bit support allows painless editing of files greater than 5GB in size, and the OpenGL support provides fast, seamless 3D acceleration and smooth zooming at all magnifications.

Photoshop’s text support isn’t any better in this edition, though. It’s slow, awkward, and often produces subpar output. It isn’t vector textâ??it’s bitmapped, with all the drawbacks inherent in that format. You’ll get far better results by importing the final image into Illustrator or CorelDraw, then adding crisp, clean vector characters to your picture.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0. The latest release of Photoshop Elements, Adobe’s lower cost and friendlier alternative to Photoshop CS4, is now out for Windows users. With every release, Adobe adds some new features, and makes some existing ones more powerful and easier to use. Version 7 is no exception to this, and blurs the line between Elements and CS4 even further. Let’s take a look at what’s new and different in Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.

Elements 7 is arranged in four main components. Organizer helps you find, tag, and sort your images. Fix gives you quick access to the most common adjustments you’ll make with your images. Create is where you’ll find slide shows, calendars, and print projects like books, templates