Adobe Photoshop CS4

I primarily use Photoshop for painting, sketching, drawing etc, and I can safely say, it's my favorite program for doing this sort of work. Ive tried Painter, and Sketchbook Pro, but Photoshop trumps both… in terms of ease of use, and productivity. This is, of course, my own experience. But, specifically, CS4's interface makes the work to be done off of the canvas quick and simple, so you can get back to work faster. The interface is perfect for my work too, because it fades into the background when you're working, but when you need a tool, it's easy to navigate and find what you want. It isn't flashy, and doesn't have carnival lights; it's simple, clean, and intuitive. That's what makes the UI for CS4 so amicable, and facilitates the whole program's ease of use. One thing that's always been in the forefront of facilitating speed is the brush system. You can just pick and choose which brushes you like the most and use the most often, and remove the rest from the list, making it quick and easy to access your tools. But, I'd have to say, the most useful part of the brush system is the right click menu. Being able to right click anywhere on the canvas and change the size and softness of the brush, change brushes, create new brushes, load a new set of brushes, and all that other good stuff, is invaluable. If the Flow and Opacity controls were in there it'd be even better, but that isn't really a complaint, the Flow and Opacity sliders are placed just fine how they are now. I also can't overstate the usefulness of masks, and paths/work paths. They can make tasks a snap when used right. I can't really comment on the Filters and Image adjustments though, seeing as I hardly ever use them in painting, so I'll move onto the last segment of the review now instead. :P As for the extra tools of Extended, even though I do 3d modeling often, I've used direct painting tools before in programs like Zbrush and Mudbox, and I'd much rather take the time to properly UVmap the model, and paint the texture in Photoshop in 2D. So, I can't comment on how worth the extra $300 that feature is for most, but I'd never use it, along with the other Extended features. Also, the rendering feature is nice an all, but I'd MUCH rather use Mental Ray. Oh and one other thing: the plugins. Oh the plugins. A vast wealth of file formats to save to and to open. I find myself using JPEGs the most, but I use PSD (duh) GIF, PNG, TGA, and IFF often too, and occasionally BMP. I've never had any problems with saving to or opening any file format, and no problems with artifacting. Plus, opening image sequences is a nice thing to have when you're rendering an animation in Mental Ray. (MR can't render to video, it only renders individual frames) Overall view: Buy it if you do work like mine. Your total time spent on a project will suffer if you use a lesser program. Obviously there are a lot of features I don't know about or haven't explored, but what the hey, no other program gives me this level of flexibility with this much ease of use, so it's worth its weight in gold.

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If your gonna buy this over priced and over rated piece of software please bear in mind that the 'customer service' means nothing at Adobe, unless you pay extra for it. The tech people are clueless and have… minimal knowledge of the software they are meant to support. It seems that these large corporations like Adobe can get away with it. It's not wonder that people are getting their software via OEM sellers.

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Perhaps I'll like CS4 better when I can get it to run long enough to edit a picture, but right now all it does is take too much time to begin running and then crash abruptly just after opening a jpeg. Of… course, I need to contact Adobe customer support on the above issue. However, I am having major problems getting in touch with them. I need to use the program on the job where calling support on the phone is not as desirable as getting help online, and Adobe customer support online SUCKS! Thankfully, so far I have been able to do everything the boss needs me to do with my old Microsoft Anniversary Edition photo program, which cost approximately 1/5 as much as this Adobe albatross. I find it hard to believe so many offices recommend CS4. What am I missing?

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