The creative suite from Adobe is a widely used set of design, editing and development tools for images, video, audio and web pages. As a follow up to CS3, Adobe Photoshop CS4 is fresh out of the beta testing and is now available for purchase. CS4 is Adobe’s biggest release to date. The software took a little less than 15 million man hours to develop.

There are four versions of CS4 available – Design Premium, which has 10 applications; Production and Web Premium, which each have eleven applications; and finally, Masters collection, which has the full suite of 17 Applications. CS4 allows interportability of data between different applications in the same window. This functionality will be achievable through a tabbed interface. Adobe Flash functionality is embedded into all the applications.

Photoshop, which is the most widely used image editing software, will feature advanced 3D painting and compositing in it’s CS4 version, which allows the users to edit, manipulate and create 3D images in real time. Fluid canvas rotation is a new feature along with a new and improved adjustment panel and color correction interfaces. There is also a new masks panel and content aware scaling, which recomposes an image as you scale it, preserving vital details.

Adobe Photoshop CS4

The Photoshop CS4 will be available in two versions, The CS4 for photographers and Web designers, and the CS4 extended for media professionals, scientific researchers, architects and engineers. Premier Pro CS4 will have SWF output, a speech search function that lets you search through the dialogues, a meta data editing work flow, blu-ray authoring, and batch processing in background.

The new features in After Effects CS4 will include tracking the motion of elements – even when they are off screen, key framing in 3D space, importing 3D layers from Photoshop, exporting layered projects and numerous interfaces and workflow tweaks. Truly, an amazing piece of software, now available.