Richard Harrington's Reasons to Upgrade to Photoshop CS4

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Hi, my name is Rich Harrington and I am the author of “Understanding Adobe Photoshop CS4.” Today, I am going to talk to you about a couple of reasons why you might want to upgrade. They have asked me for my top three reasons, but here are the things that I really find useful.

First off is the interface is so much more streamlined. You are going to find yourself clicking less, moving the mouse around less on the screen. That means you can get more work done faster, and it is a lot easier on your wrist. You are not going to end up with carpal tunnel syndrome or anything like that. You could really get to work faster.

For example, what is nice here is we want to go ahead and say, “Let us add a level’s adjustment?” I can click auto it is done. I want to look at it right here, I am down at the bottom of my layer, but I could simply say “Show me the before and after” by clicking or reset, and I am there.

Instead of having to keep opening up windows, clicking, closing, moving all over the user interface, everything is all centralized. So you have your images, you are working with it. It works great.

So related, you actually have all this cool ability to quickly switch between different window arrangements. I can go ahead and say “Give me one image full screen.” Or “Go ahead and switch and show me these as side by side documents.” So it makes it really easy to put a couple of images next to each other and work with them.

You can even say, “I want to go ahead and turn this into just a giant grid. “ And all your open images get tiled, making it supper easy to start to work, click on the image, there you go, you are going to town. F for full screen mode, you are into the image, so overall, just great refinements to that process.

The other thing that I actually love is the adjustments panel. This works great! It is so easy to make improvements to your overall image. Now let us go ahead and say, select color range and grab that yellow there, and I can now go after and tweak that. Everything I need is right here in the adjustments panel.

I could say, “Let us add a Vibrance adjustment and really make that yellow pop with a little bit more saturation.” Or you know that is great, let us load that selection again. Go back, and let us do a little bit of a curve. And we can go ahead and tweak that, or add a hue saturation and tweak the color until it is exactly where we want it, it is so nice because all those controls are right there.

What I really find helpful though, is as I start to make adjustments, there is really cool presets in here to get you started. So like, I click down curves and I go ahead and toss on a contrast curve, and go right after the details there, and that works nice. You can come on over to the image and click and drag, and even refine that.

So just really thoughtful improvements to how the image adjustments work, and they are consolidated in the adjustments panel, is that none destructive workflow. It is just fantastic.

The other thing I find myself doing all the time in Photoshop CS4 is panoramic images. It is so much easier to merge multiple panoramic photos together. That is what the photo merge command super easy, and it is just great way to make beautiful panoramic photos. Much faster, and much better than it has been in previous versions.

My name is Rich Harrington. I am the author of “Understanding Adobe Photoshop CS4.” Be sure to check out peachpit.com website for a ton of great information on Photoshop CS4 as well as a video learning center. Thanks.