Everyone knows (ok, not everyone, but most people know) that i’m not a design guy. When i have some free time (rarely and rarely ) i start to play with colours and try to make a great design. I never did until now, but i’m a perseverant guy.

Anyhow, let’s get back on CS4. Even CS4 was released officially few days ago, all suite is available on certain sites since two months ago (give or take). I don’t know why, but CS4 was one of the most waited (by me) version of Photoshop. I’m not a photographer or a designer, but… i’m just dying to see it at work.

When i finally have it, i was like.. uhm… that sucks! Because of numerous bugs and flaws, Photoshop was a BIG disappointment. Some parts were good, but the bad parts were… awful

Good things:

• 64 bit support. I own 8gb of ram but CS3 can’t handle more than 3.2Gb. Actually this is a limitation of all 32bit programs (yes, including windows!). Adobe fix this with a 64bit release of photoshop.
• Using GPU for processing. Again, it’s a great thing, but you need a decent video card. I owned a 7600GT from nvidia but no use. With my new 9800Gtx, works great
• Canvas slide (i don’t know how is named exactly) – you drag the canvas (with hand tool) and the canvas will move with a nice slide. Not necessary a workflow improvements, but it’s some kind of eyecandy.
• Rotate canvas – if you use a tablet pc or a Wacom Cintiq. Not for regular users though.
• Content aware scale – you can resize your image with AMAZING results. Great for photographers, for me… Not so great (actually isn’t good or bad)

Bad things:

Well.. Not so many bad things. But those who are here, are enough to make me not to use CS4. I use Photoshop mostly to slice layouts so here is what i found wrong:

• You can move a slice over the canvas boundaries. You can’t make it directly bigger, but you can resize/move. After you make a huge slice, you can’t resize it back (only double click, change width/height).
• On “save for web” window, if you pick gif/png format and you want to pick colours that will be transparent with color picker, you can’t SHIFT+drag on colors for multiple selections. I use this function kinda frequently, because it’s more easy that creating a “chroma key” layer. On the other hand, on “color table” box, you can pick multiple colors. Nice, but useless because i can’t guess colors…
• Photoshop CS4 64bit used to crash after 1-2 minutes. After i google it, i found the problem: if you had Guitar Pro installed, you have to remove “Guitar pro*.ttf” from c:\windows\fonts folder. I deleted that and i have no problem now

Overall, i’m happy with CS4 for only one big reason: 64bit and more than 3Gb ram support. Sometimes i get some huge files to slice (over 50Mb) and every single MB of ram is important. But those problems with slice make the whole program useless for me

I don’t use any other software from CS4, but i heard that Fireworks have some big problems too. Adobe was in big hurry to launch this, and it succeed to mess things up. I hope an update will be launched soon, otherwise CS4 will have the lowest sells in Adobe history.