Photoshop CS4 and Bridge CS4

Photoshop CS4 wouldn't leave Bridge CS4 behind which in some ways still lacks the speed and ease of use of Lightroom 2. On the bright side we still found some improvements and innovations here.

Bridge CS4 brings back the collections panel and this time includes ‘Smart Collections’, which you can use to build collections based on selected criteria. There is also an Auto-Collect feature that can cleverly analyze photos in a folder and stack them according to whether they are candidate images for creating panoramas or Merge to HDR image sets. It does this by analyzing if the photos were shot within an 18 second time frame and whether they overlap a little or a lot. It can be a little slow, but it does work automatically.


Another new feature would be the one-click preview option designed for Bridge CS4, where you just click with the space bar, to make selected images appear full frame on the screen. You can then use the keyboard arrow keys to navigate through the selected images.


Photoshop CS4 still has a long way to go match the speed and functionality of the features it happens to share with Lightroom 2.

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Content-Aware Scaling in Photoshop CS4

Content-Aware Scaling has to be one of the main features in Photoshop CS4. Advertising and design photographers will appreciate the benefits of being able to adapt a single image to multiple layout designs.

To use the content-aware scale feature, you need an image that’s on a normal layer (not a Background layer) and you simply go to the Edit menu and choose Content-Aware Scale. You can then drag the handles that appear on the bounding box for the selected layer to scale the image, making it narrower/wider, or shorter/taller.



Another ground breaking tool brought to you by Adobe Photoshop CS4

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Photoshop CS4 New User Interface and Extras

With the new release some of the most noticeable changes are in the interface design and structure. The panels can be docked within an application frame as well as the ability to easily access different workspace settings from the new application bar at the top.

The use of keyboard shortcuts to select specific tools still plays a big role in Photoshop CS4, but if you hold the key down instead, you can temporarily switch to using the tool associated with that keyboard shortcut. Release the key and you can revert to working with the previously selected tool.

This is just the beginning...

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