This may be the only post today in the blogosphere not about the election.
I've been using Photoshop CS4 for a couple weeks now, and I have opinions. I've processed several thousand images through Bridge and Camera Raw, and prepped a few images for publication through Photoshop itself. I've found bugs and crashed it, and I've also found some new raw adjustment features that I now can't live without.
One of the selling points of the upgrade was a promised faster speed in Bridge. It depends how you parse it as to whether that's true. I took a folder with 700 images and opened it in each version of Bridge. V.3 took 2:43 for the spinning top to settle down. V.4 took one minute for the thumbnails to load, but took an additional 5 minutes for the previews to process and for the spinning icon to go away. Every time you adjust a number of images in Raw, the thumbnails have to be rebuilt, and Bridge is unavailable during that interval. But the preview image does pop up right away, and you don't have that excruciating wait that often occurred in CS3 with a big folder.
Metadata in Bridge is broken. I frequently get “There was an error writing metadata to image xxx” notices. On my laptop (but not the desktop) I cannot write metadata in Bridge at all if I try and apply a metadata template (like my copyright info). I even recreated that template in CS4, but no go. The error message pops up for every single image that fails to write. If you've applied metadata to 700 images, you have 700 error messages. Your only option is to force quit the application.
I haven't delved into the new tools in Photoshop (though I turned off the tabbing option for multiple images, which I found annoying and of no redeeming value). Printing appears to be broken, or I just haven't identified the new secret handshake you always need to learn with a Photoshop upgrade. What happens is that the image as printed comes out a couple stops darker than the monitor display.
Now, what's good about the upgrade? More raw adjustment options. In particular, the adjustment brush. There's an interface that allows you to use a brush to paint in any adjustment available in the basic tab: exposure, brightness, contrast, sat, clarity, sharpness. And Color. What makes this so great? You can brighten up a face in shadow, or use the Color to correct a portion of the image (like when there's daylight on part of a scene that's largely lit by flourescent). It's fast, and intuitive, and now it's an essential part of my workflow. These are alterations I often make in a final file with complicated masks and adjustment layers, but now I just swab it on in my raw processing.
There are so many options in raw processing now that you hardly need Photoshop. Maybe all you need is Lightroom, which I assume has all the same options.
Doug, I primarily use Lightroom now instead of PS for all of my cataloging and about 95% of my image processing. The adjustment brush was added in the recent v2.0 upgrade. I find it quite a valuable and usable tool also.
Posted by: Jeff Henderson | November 05, 2008 at 10:13 PM
Like Jeff, since Lightroom 2 came out, I hardly ever go to Photoshop. I did buy CS4 but I have done little more with it so far than install it and play around with the new features.
Posted by: Tommy Williams | November 06, 2008 at 07:09 AM
I have probably processed 50,000 images through Bridge and ACR. That's a big investment in muscle memory. Much as I would like to consider a move to Lightroom, the productivity hit would be huge. I had trouble with the interface when I first tried it, v.1, when it seemed to be a swiss army type application. I understand it is much improved, and for anyone with less investment in PS I think it is the better choice now.
Posted by: Doug Plummer | November 06, 2008 at 07:27 AM