Happy Ides of October: I’m delighted to say that Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended, along with the whole Creative Suite 4, are now shipping. The product tryouts haven’t yet been posted to Adobe.com, but you can sign up to be notified when they’re available. In the meantime you can grab the new Flash Player 10 to enable all kinds of good new stuff (Pixel Bender, 3D, etc.).
I have a dual 2.0 G5 with a Radeon X800 XT, 256mb vram, it appears that I can’t use the grab and flick or the rotate canvas feature in PS CS4? Is that right? I bought this $600 video card to power a 30″ display 3 years ago—is it that out dated already? Thanks John.
[Yes, I’m afraid so. The advances in GPUs over the last couple of years trounce those in CPUs. The same level of power that was an expensive built-to-order option on my MacBook Pro two years ago can now be had for fifty bucks. We don’t want to shut anyone out, but we also have to place our bets more on the future than on the past. As promised we’ll post much more detailed info soon. –J.]
Thanks John, I know the drill, ahhhhh, the technology world. I’ve just been holding out on buying a new tower because I’m waiting for Apple to finally redesign them. At least the zoom percentage seems to work which is heaven sent 🙂 Thanks again John.
The only card that will provide the required Shader Model 3 that I could find Is a mutant flashed-for-Mac nVidia GeForce 7800 GT 256MB AGPx8 Video Card.
This is a mutant card with firmware-updated for Mac; and the only Model Shader 3.0 card that seems to be available for the G5/AGP x8 Bus Macs).
Cost: about $338.
It is working perfectly with CS4 on my G5 and all of the OpenGL features are fully available to me.
More on this issue here:
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b69dcd/
Ahhh! No trials available at launch?! This kind of kills the excitement of launch day for those that try before they buy… or are just excited to try the newest toys. 🙁
D.
[Yeah, I really have no idea about why this is. It surprised me. –J.]
Well, I bought it and now it’s time to download it. And I can’t. After all the negative feedback from beta testers on why they didn’t like the download manager, why had Adobe made it mandatory for downloading software?
Oh, the pain… 😛
With great anticipation I downloaded my preordered copy of Photoshop CS4 Ext. I am well aware that Adobe said there would not be official support for Win XP 64bit, but my trial of Lightroom loaded and worked fine, so I was hopeful.
I was delighted that CS4 64bit would install without any special trick on XP 64bit.
After installing 64bit and upping the amount of memory PS should use to 5Gb, everything just flew.
However, the GPU feature cannot be enabled (greyed out). In spite of the fact that my video card FireGL V3600 (w latest driver) is on the tested list, CS4 said it could not recognize it. I went and installed the CS4 32bit version, hoping that the GPU would then be detected and do its job, since I have no problems running 3D programs such as DAZ Studio, Hexagon, Carrara, Poser etc. In fact this is the reason I purchased the CS4 Extended version!
I called ATI tech support and they verified I had the latest driver. Curiously they could not find Adobe on the Certified drivers list at all and were puzzled by that.
I also talked to Adobe tech support and they could not find any documents and notes that I have not already read. They had me start w a clean Prefs file, but that made no difference either.
The wording on one of these documents makes it sound as if Adobe is claiming that XP 64bit drivers do no support OpenGL, which is, as I have explained, incorrect, or at least oversimplified and misleading.
Without the GPU feature some of the best CS4 features will not work, and the 3D functions are no go.
Any suggestions, ideas, other than to dump XP 64bit OS and go to the despised Vista?
Dan
[GPU features aren’t supported on XP64, but this tech note tells you more. –J.]
Ann,
where did you find the card? I looked “everywhere”
Thanks
Scott
gebilwil@netscape.net
I’m also looking forward to the trial versions, but for a rather different reason. I live in Japan and although I will be buying the English version, http://www.adobe.com/jp/ has yet to even acknowledge the existence of CS4. Considering that pretty much all the rest of the world at least has access to the English version, this is quite disappointing. (Perhaps not surprising though – this is after all the country that gets certain movies 3+ months after the rest of the world.)
John, any word on when the Japanese announcement might be made? I’m hoping to be able to buy CS4 before the trial versions run out on me.
Re: trial downloads
visit the download site and there’s a signup to get an email alert to let you know when the PS trial’s ready for a taste test.
Okay, I got it installed. Must have been the firewall at work blocking the download manager.
I’ve already found a bug in Photoshop. 😀
But it’s running really sweet! This is great stuff. Congrats on delivering a really improved version of our favorite photo tool!
GPU acceleration and 64bit on Windows is wonderful. I’m glad we are seeing performance advances like these.
I’ll have to hold off on CS4 until I can find a sweet deal. I am not sure if OSU has a discount, or if that discount is in my price range as a college student. I think food and school books trump Photoshop at the current prices listed here.
http://www.adobe.com/education/products/creativesuite/?trackingid=DRITA
Maybe Adobe can do an “Ultimate Steal” type thing
http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-us/default.aspx
I’d pay 60 dollars in a heartbeat.
I do not mean to harp on the price, just realistically, I cannot get CS4.
I have CS3 now that I bought with a amazon gift cert that I won at a campus event 😉 Maybe something
Scott:
I bought my card from AppleMacanix who sell through an eBay store and their service was excellent:
http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/applemacanix
They are listing a similar card right now:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Mac-nVidia-GeForce-7800-GT-256MB-AGP-Video-Card-G4-G5_W0QQitemZ310090144861QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item310090144861&_trkparms=72%3A1205%7C39%3A1%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C240%3A1318&_trksid=p3911.c0.m14
I didn’t mess with the auction but just put in an Offer (aout 10% below their Buy it Now price) and sealed the deal.
The card is new and under warranty and I bought an extended Warranty through an outfit called Square Trade.
http://www.squaretrade.com/pages/
More about all this is here:
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?14@@.59b69dcd/
Hope that helps,
Ann
The allowoldgpus extension mentioned in the tech note John pointed to should allow most modern gpus to work on xp 64 although it is “at your own risk”.
[Jerry, by the way, is one of the rock stars who’s been toiling for the last several years to bring GPU support to Photoshop. –J.]
About languagesupport.
Glad to see PSCS4 released. Will have to wait until nov 10 for swedish version though. BUT: 2 betatesters told me that different languages would be included in the same package. Is this true? Will I be able to switch back and forth between languages? Will I beable to switch between english and swedish? Which version do I have to buy? I have talked to swedish customersupport but they do not know. Haven´t even heard of it.
Thanks, Bosse
[Serial number licenses are sold on a per-language basis. That is, you can’t buy English and switch to Swedish on the fly. If you do buy licenses for more than one language, however, you no longer need to install and maintain multiple copies of the app. The PS installer will apply multiple language packs to the same binary, meaning you’ll then be able to switch PS among those languages on the fly. Hopefully that makes sense. –J.]
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Adobe-Photoshop-Extended-CS4-PC/dp/B001G8Y7KO/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1224162895&sr=8-8
read the review adobe. you charge more for a download than for killing a forrest and making manuals. you have messed up ethics.
also your software is almost double the price in the uk compared to the usa.
Are you so surprised when people download cracks????
[People have always ripped off Adobe and always will. People rip off shareware vendors who sell their stuff for $10. –J.]
I just got an ad in my email for Adobe Creative Suite 4. In the ad, the actual products included with the various CS4 bundles are represented, not by their actual names, but by their abstract icons dancing (or tumbling? like popcorn? like fireworks?) above each box.
So let me see. If I buy “Web Premium” I not only get [Ps], [Ai], [Dw] and [Fl], but the indispensable [Sb]. This warms my heart.
I wonder why none of them come with [Lr]. You’d think they’d put everything into “Master Collection,” but who am I to wonder?
Of course, who could do without [En] and [Ol]?
Interestingly, [Ct], which is not included in any of the “Premium” packages, somehow is so important that it’s included in the Master Collection.
I will admit that I was able to intuit the meanings of [Ps], [Ai], [Dw] and [Fl], but sadly the identities of [En], [Ol] and [Ct] remain tantalizing mysteries.
Can’t buy it until Adobe can fix the NAPP coupon error in their store. I think a lot of others are waiting for this as well.
How did the Master Collection ship with the StoneHenge Photoshop beta instead of the actual released Photoshop? That has caused all sorts of problems. I’ve had to uninstall, redownload, re-install. I couldn’t deactivate for some reason even though it said I was deactivated. Who knows if I have any activations left after this mess.
[Sorry, just learned about this myself. It’s pretty embarrassing. I’m told that the incorrect bits (Windows only) have been pulled down. They may be back up by now, and you should expect to hear from Adobe about it. Thanks for your patience. –J.]
The new feature for blending images with different focal points is awesome. I was even able to create a depth map from all the the masks and use that for the lens blur filter to re-blur the combined image.
BUT…. It would be so much easier to fix problem areas if all the images could share one grayscale mask. Each layer would correspond to a different shade of gray in the mask/depth map. That way, I could easily heal or paint over the areas that the filter gets confused by, such as sharp edged bokeh and the edges of the image.
Something like this could probably be scripted, but then it wouldn’t work live.
[Thanks for the feedback; I’ve passed it along to the team. –J.]
Any word on the trial downloads yet?
[I believe they’ll be up in mid November. –J.]
Out of curiosity, are the executables any different than the standard ones – which if I recall (maybe incorrectly) default to trial if you don’t enter a key?
[They’re one and the same, as you remember. I don’t know what accounts for the delay. –J.]
Thanks,
David
When Are The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Trial Be Ready To Download?!
why is it that the trial version of photoshop had open gl working with my card but the full release no longer does? I’m on a macbook pro and finding it impossible to find new drivers!?