More About Photoshop CS4 And Graphics Acceleration

Some of the news stories coming out today regarding Creative Suite 4 (CS4) are detailing Photoshop CS4 and, in particular, its snappier handling thanks to breakthroughs in graphics processor usage. Here’s a quote from the CNET article linked above, and attributed to Photoshop product manager John Nack:

How will this affect your daily work? Fortunately, I’ve been using the Photoshop CS4 Extended beta for a month or so for a variety of tasks—color correction, retouching, illustration and more—and there are three major benefits I see while working:

• Super-fast zooming. Have you noticed, when zooming in and out with older versions of Photoshop, the application needs to redraw the image in blocks? If you execute a huge zoom you can make Photoshop pause a moment while it figures out what to draw. Photoshop CS4 has none of this: zooming in from 3% to 1600% is so fast and smooth it’s like you’re falling into the image. My beta version doesn’t seem to do this as fluidly as the beta version I saw in July at Adobe headquarters, but I am holding off judgment until I get the shipping product and see what users are going to receive.
• Smooth rotation. This is another trick I saw at Adobe but that I’m not seeing in my beta copy. Rotating images is as smooth as spinning a piece of paper on a desk. Photoshop CS4 also has a cute little compass icon that shows up now when rotating an image.
• Moving around the canvas is more like flying now. All of us have used the Hand tool or the slider bars to move around an image. In the past Photoshop has had to redraw what shows up in the window, but Photoshop CS4 makes this as smooth as real life. There’s even a new trick where you can grab an image with the Hand tool, drag and let go while you’re dragging, and the image will “float” in the direction you dragged it. It’s like sliding a paper across a desk—let go and the paper still have momentum. Photoshop CS4 handles images in a similar way. However, this takes a little getting used to and I found it annoying sometimes when I would drag to where I wanted to go and Photoshop CS4 would let my target glide on by. Again, I’m holding judgment on this feature until I see it in the final product.

One more thing to note is that Photoshop CS4 seems capable of doing these tricks on a super-large image as easily as a small image. John was the demonstrator when I saw Photoshop CS4 in July, and he was demonstrating on a photo of Adobe headquarters that was something like 60 inches by 40 inches, 300dpi resolution.