Follow TG Daily
TG Daily Live Twitter Facebook

Featured Slideshows

Find more in our Slideshow Overview »

Featured Articles

Most Discussed Articles

More Discussions»

Articles By Tag

amd Android antitrust apple ARM blackberry censorship china facebook Firefox google Green Dam hp ibm intel internet iphone microsoft mozilla netbook nokia PS3 Samsung security smartphone Sony twitter wii Windows 7 Xbox 360

What We Read

Pssst! Ready to jailbreak your iPhone 3GS?
Pssst! Ready to jailbreak your iPhone 3GS?
Read | Comments

Firefox, IE. Tech journalists are a disgrace
Firefox, IE. Tech journalists are a disgrace
Read | Comments

Sad Twitterers pay for friends
Sad Twitterers pay for friends
Read | Comments

Related Articles

Opinions

SmallNetBuilder

Read more at
   SmallNetBuilder.com
Try our new and free
Price Comparison Service

Partners

Reviews & Rankings



First Look: Photoshop CS4 with GPU acceleration

 PDF Print E-mail
Software
By Wolfgang Gruener   
Monday, September 22, 2008 22:27
Article Index
First Look: Photoshop CS4 with GPU acceleration
Page 2
Page 3
Page 2 of 3
 

Key new features

There are several dozen new features, many of which I will not touch in this article – such as an updated Bridge, Camera RAW integration with more flexible image editing features. Here are the most noteworthy changes in CS4.

1. GPU acceleration and 64-bit. Depending on your view, this new feature may be exciting or disappointing. The bad news is that only canvas rotating and zooming support GPU acceleration. Adobe said it will make additional features available, such as the “Pixel Bender” component, which did not make it into the final version. The good news is that we finally see GPGPU acceleration in a commercial application and see more horsepower to deal with those huge image files. Combine this feature with 64-bit support and lots of RAM and you could see dramatic performance improvements beyond a factor of 10. Adobe, by the way, said that both AMD/ATI and Nvidia graphic cards will provide (OpenGL-based) acceleration, as long as a graphics card has at least 128 MB of memory.

Image

Image

Our review was limited to the 32-bit version, but the performance jump was obvious. We used an 80 megapixel (22.300 x 3600 pixels) picture with a file size of 720 MB and found that zooming worked as smooth as it does in a 3 megapixel image, while it was painful to do the same in CS3. Canvas rotation saw some delay, usually two to three seconds. However, this performance translates into a 6x improvement over CS3. We were told that a GPGPU-accelerated filter called Pixel Bender with GPGPU support will be offered as a free download from Adobe Labs for CS4 in the near future.

Image
Rotating an 80 megapixel image.


So far, GPGPU acceleration doesn’t go far, but the potential is clear. Adobe noted that CS4 is a first step into that direction and additional features that support GPGPUs are likely to be added down the road.    
 

2. Animated Zoom, flick-panning and Pixel Grid. Handling especially high-resolution images is much more convenient with a new zoom package. Users can now keep the zoom function pressed and Photoshop will zoom into the picture dynamically until the mouse button is released. At zoom levels greater than 500%, Photoshop now shows a pixel grid which makes it much easier to analyze and edit individual pixels. Moving around within a large image has been accelerated with flick-panning, much like iPhone users scroll through web pages or email lists: The image appears to be floating and can be “thrown” in any direction using the hand tool.

Image
Photo at 100% and ...


Image
... at 3200% with pixel grid. The grid appears at zoom levels of 501% and higher.



3. Image Blending, Stack Blending. Adding image blending to enable the creation of panorama pictures was one of the big additions in Photoshop CS3 and Adobe has extended this feature set significantly. New options are spherical, and collage blending, while the interactive layout option is gone. New output options include Vignette and Geometric Distortion Correction, which creates much more realistic blended files.

Image

One of the most impressive new features that conceivably will result in dramatic picture creations is stack blending. The same picture with different focus levels can be layered on “stacked” to create a photo without areas that are out of focus. Adobe demonstrated this feature with a macro shot of an ant, which left me breathless.

Image
Ant out of focus ...


Image
The stack-blended version.



I personally was not able to test the new blending and stacking features, as the beta kept crashing during the blending process. Keep in mind this was a beta and bugs or installation problems are to be expected. I will wait for the final to revisit the new blending features.


4. Content-Aware Scaling. When you are resizing and cutting a picture and prepare the file for publication – either for the Web or Print – you can often run into issues that a file isn’t high or wide enough. A little help is provided by CS4 with the Content-Aware Scaling feature. In contrast to the simple scaling feature, which squeezes the entire picture regardless of content, Content-Aware Scaling excludes focus areas of a picture from the scaling process. It does not always work well and often requires a mask to mark focus areas, but Content-Aware Scaling can be a great help especially in those cases where only minor adjustments are necessary.

5. 3D. The largest feature addition is the enhanced and much more integrated support for 3D files within Photoshop. Combined into one menu, common 3D files can be imported and directly edited with Photoshop tools. Image files can also be wrapped around a provided (and extensible) set of 3D shapes, such as cubes, pyramids, hats or soda cans. Animating 3D files is substantially easier than in the CS3.

It is important to note that creating 3D files from the included features isn’t as intuitive as the editing of imported files, which conceivably will simplify the creation of much more sophisticated 3D presentations and animations.

 

Read on the next page: Also noteworthy, Conclusion

 
 

Shop Keywords: Adobe, Photoshop, GPGPU, CS4

[ Back ]

Related Articles
-view -software -140 --140
Powered By Page_Cache by Ircmaxell
Generated in 0.705658197403 Seconds