Adobe Photoshop CS4

Other products by Adobe

Product Features

• Take greater advantage of all that Adobe Photoshop CS4 software offers with a more intuitive user interface and features that put you in control
• Bring your vision to life with industry-leading tools that let you enhance images and create composites that help meet your highest standards
• Be more productive by taking advantage of smooth integration with other Adobe software and enhancements that leverage the power of today's faster graphics processors
• Access the unrivaled power of Adobe Photoshop CS4 software through a more intuitive user experience, greater editing freedom, and significant productivity enhancements
• Photoshop CS4 features new ways to make image adjustments and create masks, more powerful compositing, improved color correction, accelerated graphics handling, and enhanced raw image processing

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 96 x 68.4 x 22.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B001EUBSL0
• Item model number: 65015634
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 23, 2008
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #279 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Access the unrivaled power of Adobe Photoshop CS4 software through a more intuitive user experience, greater editing freedom, and significant productivity enhancements. Photoshop CS4 features new ways to make image adjustments and create masks, more powerful compositing, improved color correction, accelerated graphics handling, and enhanced raw image processing.

Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended feature a newly refined, tab-based interface in a single, integrated window, with self-adjusting panels arranged in docked groups. Automatically keeping tools well organized and away from your work area means you get greater efficiency, less clutter, and better results, faster than before. Click to enlarge.

Create powerful images with the professional standard

Adjustments panel
Simplify image adjustment by easily accessing every tool you need to nondestructively adjust and enhance the color and tone of your images; on-image controls and a wide variety of presets are also included in the new live and dynamic Adjustments panel.

Masks panel
Quickly create and edit masks from the new Masks panel. This panel offers all the tools you need to create editable pixel- and vector-based masks, adjust mask density and feathering, easily select noncontiguous objects, and more.

Nondestructive image editing
Experiment without harming your original photo. Visualize different effects and manipulate objects using nondestructive Smart Filters and Smart Objects.

Industry-leading color correction
Enjoy dramatically enhanced control with reengineered Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools that now intelligently preserve color and tone details. Make precise adjustments with Brightness/Contrast and Curves controls, the histogram, channel lines, and a clipping preview.

Better raw image processing
Enjoy superior conversion quality as you process raw images with the industry-leading Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 5 plug-in, which now offers localized corrections, post-crop vignetting, TIFF and JPEG processing, and support for more than 190 camera models.

Richer painting and drawing toolset
Create or modify images with a wide assortment of professional, fully customizable drawing tools, paint settings, and artistic brushes. Simply drag to resize brushes and adjust for hardness as you paint and preview brush strokes.

The new Adjustments panel helps eliminate almost 90% of the mouse movements required to make nondestructive image adjustments. Click to enlarge.

Spot color and exposure adjustments are more natural with the improved Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools.

Enhanced Auto-Blend technology automatically masks and blends frame edges for better results on panoramas. Click to enlarge.

Quick Selection tool
Loosely draw on an image area and the Quick Selection tool automatically completes the selection for you. Then use simple sliders to preview and refine your selection.

Improved Adobe Photoshop Lightroom workflow
Select multiple photos in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom software (sold separately), and automatically open them in Photoshop CS4 to merge them into a panorama, a high dynamic range (HDR) photo, or a multilayered Photoshop document. And seamlessly roundtrip back to Lightroom.

Enhanced auto-alignment of layers
Create accurate composites with the enhanced Auto-Align Layers command. Move, rotate, or warp layers to align them more accurately than ever before. Or use spherical alignment to create breathtaking panoramas.

Enhanced auto-blending of images
Easily create a single image from a series of shots that have different focal points with the enhanced Auto-Blend Layers command, which smoothly blends color and shading and now extends your depth of field, automatically correcting vignettes and lens distortion.

Extended depth of field
Combine a range of images, each with a different exposure, color, and focal point--with options to preserve tones and colors--into a single color-corrected image.

Powerful printing options
Get outstanding prints with superior color management, tight integration with leading printer models, and the ability to preview out-of-gamut image areas. Support for 16-bit printing on Mac OS offers increased color depth and clarity.

Efficient file management with Adobe Bridge CS4
Get instant access to Adobe Bridge CS4 with faster start-up, use new workspaces to jump to the right display for every task, easily create web galleries and PDF contact sheets, and more.

Broad file format support
Import and export hundreds of file formats, including PSD, AI, PDF, NEF, CRW, TIFF, BMP, Cineon, JPEG, JPEG2000, FXG, OpenEXR, PNG, and Targa.

Profiles to support the color-blind
Design with sensitivity for color-blind individuals by creating soft proofs of your images using built-in Color Universal Design Organization profiles.

Extensibility
Get and share Adobe Flash technology-based panels that developers create to accomplish customized tasks. Plus, get tips and tricks from the thriving worldwide community of Photoshop users through the new Adobe Community Help online service.*

Top new features in Photoshop CS4

The new versions of Photoshop are about much more than just adding new features. They're about providing you with best practices in the tasks you do daily--about making your work in Photoshop not just faster and easier, but more intelligent, and more natively nondestructive. Here are the top new features and enhancements in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended.

Live, nondestructive corrections with the Adjustments panel
Photoshop CS4 speeds workflow performance with the Adjustments panel, cutting the time it takes to make nondestructive adjustments like Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation, and much more. There's no dialog box maze to navigate--just go straight to the task at hand. The Adjustments panel brings the right tool for the right job to your fingertips, dynamically, saving precious time. The panel features the new Vibrance adjustment, giving you greater control over color saturation while preserving delicate tones, such as skin colors. On-image adjustments are now available for Hue/Saturation and Curves. Plus, for even greater convenience and time savings, the panel features a wide variety of modifiable presets for each type of change, including more than 20 new preconfigured, customizable starting points. Photoshop CS4 speeds you through countless tasks with the Adjustments panel.

A range of shots, each with different exposure, color, and focal points (left) automatically becomes a single, color-corrected, expanded depth-of-field image with Auto-Blend Layers. Click to enlarge.

Simply drag the new Rotate View tool outside the image area to spin your canvas to the orientation that works best for you. Click to enlarge.

The new Pixel Grid appears at magnifications of 600% or higher, facilitating the finest detail editing. Click to enlarge.

Bridge CS4 makes it easier to work with all of your image assets, with intuitive, easily discoverable controls for camera import, viewing and sorting, contact-sheet and web-gallery creation. You'll also find more versatile throughput to Photoshop CS4, including opening multiple files as a single, multi-layered image, and much more. Click to enlarge.

Re-editable, feathered, density-controlled masks
The new Masks panel smooths and speeds the creation and adjustment of pixel and vector masks, making it easier than ever to apply effects to precisely defined areas of an image. Now, with simple sliders, you can adjust the density and feathering of a mask, to control both the sharpness of the mask edge and how much of the adjustment effect you'd like to reveal. The Refine Mask feature allows simple yet fine-grained control over the mask size and edges. And Color Range has been upgraded for better accuracy and power. It's a fast way to automatically create powerful and detailed masks based on single or multiple colors, with simple controls for the spatial tolerance and "fuzziness" of the color sampling.

More refined, natural results with Dodge, Burn, and Sponge
In the days of film, paper, safelights, and chemicals, photographers dodged and burned their prints during exposure, to darken and brighten areas of an image as they created it. It was an art that required steady hands and practice to master. The newly refined Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools in Photoshop CS4 take the pain and practice out of preserving tonal quality while you spot-correct exposure and color saturation. Simply paint the area you want to adjust and get advanced results in a fraction of the time.

Enhanced Auto-Align, Auto-Blend, and new 360-degree panoramas
The automatic alignment and blending technology in Photoshop CS4 enhances a wide variety of features, but nowhere are the improvements more obvious than in Photomerge¨. Now, when you stitch a sequence of images into a panorama, enhanced blending combines with new vignetting and geometric distortion corrections to bring you even better results--a panorama with more natural colors blended from one end of the scene to the other. Additional improvements include the ability to create 360-degree panoramas, automatic detection of fish eye lenses to compensate for their inherent distortion, and the new Collage option which rotates and scales individual images as they are combined using Auto-Align and Photomerge.

Extended depth of field
Whether it's the extreme close-up, the microbial world, or simply low-light conditions, there are times when the depth of field you can capture with your camera is extremely shallow. Now, you can shoot the scene with a series of focal points, and use the enhanced Auto-Blend Layers feature to automatically create a new, single image with a depth of field encompassing the entire series. You can even color-correct the images at the same time, automatically. This feature provides breathtaking enhancement of any scene where lighting and depth of field are in short supply.

Fluid canvas rotation
Photoshop CS4 introduces a revolutionary new feature that lets you paint and draw as easily and naturally as sitting down at an easel. With the new Rotate View tool, you can nondestructively spin your canvas to any orientation you desire--a boon to every illustrator, whether you paint by mouse or tablet. No pixel distortion, no craning your head to get the perspective you want, and no matter how you spin your canvas, Photoshop CS4 adjusts your selections, grids, rulers, and other tools and features to match your chosen orientation.

Ultra-smooth, extra-precise pan, zoom, preview, and painting tools
Most modern computers contain a powerful graphics processor (GPU) that is almost like having a second computer inside the box. Photoshop CS4 leverages the power of your GPU with OpenGL technology to blast past the image-viewing restrictions of yesterday. Zoom all the way down to the level of individual pixels, with perfect clarity even at the oddest magnification percentages. Smoothly navigate around the largest images with no stutter or preview lag. Use the new Pixel Grid to easily edit images at the highest magnification. And revel in a faster, easier painting workflow, with brushes you can resize by dragging your mouse; new brush cursors that more clearly preview brush strokes before you make them; and improved, higher precision tablet tracking. Navigating very large images is easier than ever--instantly zoom high overhead to move to a new area of the image, and just as instantly zoom back in to the highest magnification. You can also ÒtossÓ the image across the screen with the Hand tool--the physics engine in Photoshop CS4 will give you a natural pan in any direction.

Next generation Adobe Bridge CS4
Finding, previewing, and managing all of your image assets jumps to a new level of power and convenience with Adobe Bridge CS4, beginning with faster performance from startup through to handing off images to Photoshop CS4. New path-bar navigation and workspace selection buttons across the top of the Bridge window let you instantly jump to just the right display for every task, including new Camera Import controls, visual folder navigation, and a new Carousel View for larger image-group selections. In the Output workspace, Bridge now features PDF-based contact-sheet creation and web-gallery creation and uploading. You can preview 3D images and panoramas created in Photoshop CS4. The new Search field helps you quickly find images in Bridge, and is also integrated with the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X and the Desktop Search feature in Windows¨ Vista. You can even switch to the new, intuitive List View, with its familiar data display and sorting controls.

Tighter integration with Photoshop Lightroom 2
Professionals and other advanced photographers rely on the one-two punch of Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom software as the complete digital photography toolkit. Photoshop CS4 makes this workflow easier than ever, with improved cross-application support for automated functions, such as opening multiple photographs from Lightroom 2 directly into a layered Photoshop document, high dynamic range (HDR) image, panorama, or Smart Object. Lightroom 2 and Adobe Camera Raw also share the same underlying technology, which means the changes you make with Camera Raw 5 in Photoshop CS4 are recognized in Lightroom 2, and vice versa.

Camera Raw 5 with localized, nondestructive adjustments
Providing the first step in the processing of raw data from your digital camera, Camera Raw now enables you to make localized adjustments by simply painting the area to be affected, and then using sliders to control the change. Additional enhancements include Post Crop Vignetting, and gradient-based localized correction. You can apply the same Camera Raw adjustments to TIFF and JPEG photographs, and, as always, the corrections you make are completely nondestructive, with the original files being maintained in their pristine state.

Unified tabbed interface with self-adjusting panels
Photoshop CS4 helps you keep your work area efficient and clutter-free, with a new unified application frame, tab-based interface and self-adjusting panels. You'll notice immediately how the Photoshop interface appears cleaner--instead of having to arrange multiple image windows, Photoshop does it for you with a tab for each open image. Docked panel groups keep to the side of your images, so you have fewer things to move around while you work. Individual panels expand and contract automatically to show you the controls you need, and you can even collapse entire panel groups to their header rows with a single click. Of course, you can still manually arrange floating windows and panels to suit your working style, even moving all of your panels to a second monitor if you prefer.

New Post Crop Vignetting lets you recreate artistic vignette effects in a photograph even after the original edge of the photo has been cropped away. Click to enlarge.

Photoshop CS4 helps you keep your work area efficient and clutter-free, with a new unified application frame, tab-based interface and self-adjusting panels. Click to enlarge.

Printing improvements in Photoshop CS4 include 16-bit printing (Mac OS X only) and preview of out-of-gamut colors. Click to enlarge.

The Adobe Kuler panel makes it simple to browse, create, and share color themes online. Click to enlarge.

Smarter Smart Objects
Smart Object layers allow for nondestructive scaling and transformation of Photoshoplayers. With Photoshop CS4, you can now apply perspective transformations to SmartObjects, work with linked layer masks, and use the new Eyedropper tool option to sampleeither the current layer or all of the layers in the Smart Object at once.

More powerful printing options
Photoshop CS4 brings even higher quality to large, detailed images when taken to print. You can now preview out-of-gamut colors and take advantage of a streamlined printing interface. In addition, only on Mac OS X for this release, 16-bit printing is available for the first time, vastly increasing the color depth and clarity possible in printing.

Higher performance on very large images (Windows 64 only)
Photoshop CS4 has now been optimized to take advantage of even more RAM on 64-bit-capable Windows PCs that are running a 64-bit version of Windows Vista.

Additional refinements
The evolution of Photoshop software always includes a vast array of small but important improvements and additions. Extra refinements in Photoshop CS4 include:

• Support for multi-touch gestures available on newer Apple MacBook Pro and MacBook Air computers running Mac OS X Leopard
• Clone Stamp and Healing Brush live preview cursor for easier, more precise cloning and healing results
• Layer-based metadata enabling reading and writing strings to layer properties, such as recording time-stamp information for video
• Developers of specialized applications can create custom SWF-format panels that smoothly integrate with Photoshop CS4
• Extensible SWF-based File Info panel, enabling developers to add network-stored keywords, perform spell-checking, and other functions
• Unique IDs per document for easier downstream tracking of assets
• CUDO technology, providing the ability to design with sensitivity for color blind individuals via soft-proofing
• Spring-loaded keys to temporarily shift between tools by holding down a tool shortcut key
• FXG export
• Device Link color profile support
• Notes panel, to keep annotations from cluttering the canvas

Creative Pro Online Services

Photoshop CS4 gives you built-in access to a world of online resources with Creative Pro Online Services. Search for help; share your screen with colleagues or clients in a few clicks; create and share color harmonies; and more.

Adobe Community Help
Get the power of an online search engine with targeted results. Searchable content includes the in-depth Photoshop Help, plus additional Adobe and third-party content chosen by experts at Adobe and in the design and production communities. With Adobe Community Help, you can find the focused answers you need, fast, simply by choosing Help > Photoshop Help (Internet connection required).

Acrobat.com
Acrobat.com is a set of online services--file sharing and storage, PDF converter, online word processor, and web conferencing--that you can use to create and share documents, communicate in real time, and simplify working with others. Thanks to the connection between one of the Acrobat.com services, Adobe ConnectNow, and Photoshop CS4, you can meet live over the web to share your screen, present creative concepts and ideas, and brainstorm with up to two online guests for no additional service charge. To share your screen with colleagues and clients, choose File > Share My Screen. Guests can then see your desktop on their screens as you work. You can exchange ideas using the chat pod, add a live video or audio feed, or use the Whiteboard feature to enable guests to comment on content. You can even temporarily hand over control of the screen to a guest to collaborate on a file. Additional Acrobat.com services, such as Share, Create PDF, My Files, and Adobe Buzzword, are accessible via your web browser. (Internet connection required.)

Adobe Kuler
Explore, create, and share color themes with Adobe Kuler. Kick start your creative projects with color inspiration from the online Kuler community. Browse thousands of themes by newest, most popular, or highest rated; or search themes by tag word, title, or creator. Themes can be downloaded and moved to your Swatches panel with one click. Or use an interactive color wheel that supports standard harmony rules to develop new color themes that you can save, move to your Swatches panel, and upload to share with others (Internet connection required for community functionality).

Adobe Bridge Home
Click Bridge Home in the Favorites panel of Adobe Bridge CS4 and stay up to date with what's new from Adobe, and from the design, web development, and video and audio production communities at large. Watch the latest video tutorials for your Creative Suite 4 components, listen to a podcast interview with a leading designer, or learn about the next training event in your community. Discover tips and resources that can help you make the most of Photoshop CS4 (Internet connection required).

Part of the Adobe Creative Suite 4 family

Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended are important components of the Adobe Creative Suite 4 family of software. Creative Suite 4 Design Premium is everything a modern designer needs to create eye-catching images, breathtaking graphics, expert typography, precision layout, and high-quality production for print, web, interactive, and mobile content. Creative Suite 4 Web Premium is a complete solution for creating interactive websites, applications, user interfaces, presentations, mobile device content, Adobe AIR applications, and other digital experiences. Creative Suite 4 Production Premium is must-have software for creative professionals who need to craft world-class video, audio, and interactive media--on-air, online, on-device, and invariably on deadline. Creative Suite 4 Master Collection is the complete solution for customers requiring the ultimate power and versatility of the complete line of Adobe Creative Suite 4 components.

Product Description

Introducing Fluid Canvas Rotation

Smoother panning and zooming and fluid canvas rotation
Navigate to any area of an image with new, ultra-smooth zooming and panning. Maintain clarity as you zoom to individual pixels and easily edit at the highest magnification with the new Pixel Grid. And use the revolutionary new Rotate View tool to smoothly turn your canvas for distortion-free viewing at any angle.

Create powerful images with the professional standard

Adobe Photoshop CS4 software provides improved access to its unrivaled power through a more intuitive user experience, greater editing freedom, and significant productivity enhancements.

Did you know.......

There's a solution for pro photographers
Buy Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom 2 together and you can import, process, manage, edit, composite, and showcase your images - and save 30% on Lightroom.

Working with images is now easier
Navigate around images more naturally with fluid canvas rotation and enhanced pan and zoom tools.

Education discounts are available
As a student or educator, you qualify for education pricing. See the full list of products available for purchase.

DNG raw format is supported
The DNG format helps promote archival confidence, since digital-imaging software solutions will be able to open your raw files more easily in the future.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

129 of 134 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Most powerful photo editor available, November 14, 2008

By	Joseph Boone (Irvine, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Since this review is specifically for the full version of Photoshop CS4, I will not be comparing it to prior versions. I'll save that information for a separate review of the upgrade version. If you're looking at the full version of Photoshop, I assume that you're wondering whether it's worth your hard earned dollars to take the plunge for the first time into the world of major league photo editing programs. Make no mistake, Photoshop is indeed the top gun in the field, there is no finer product. Over the next several paragraphs, I'll try to cover it's key advantages and let you decide for yourself whether it's worth the rather hefty price Adobe demands to buy into the franchise or if it makes more sense to buy a competing product.

Adobe is in the enviable position of not only publishing Photoshop, but also it's biggest competitor, Adobe Photoshop Elements 7. While Elements cannot stand up to Photoshop feature for feature, it is nonetheless a powerful photo editor and one capable of producing excellent prints. For the majority of photos, I doubt anyone could tell the difference which program produced the results assuming a competent user was at the controls. Moreover, Elements sells for a just over 10% of Photoshop's price, a significant discount to say the least.

Which product is best for you depends on a number of factors. First, have you done any editing at all or is this your first attempt at image manipulation? Do you want to primarily adjust simple things like contrast, color saturation, and maybe get rid of red eye? These are things that Elements can handle just as well as Photoshop for a fraction of the price (it can do a lot more, but these are reasonable examples). Another question is how frequently you'll work with a program like this. The price tag for Photoshop is a big pill to swallow if you're going to edit family snapshots a couple of times a year.

The two main drawbacks to Elements are that it lacks some of the more powerful tools unique to CS4 and that some methods of achieving the same results will take more time. That's an important point, so I'll repeat it. For most of your photos, you can achieve virtually identical results in Elements... but it will take more time to do it. Determining how highly you value your own time, and how often you edit photos, could be a key factor in whether CS4 is worth buying.

Beyond the cost of your time, let's consider the problem photos that you may not be able to edit properly in Elements. Most often, if a shot doesn't turn out well I just ignore it and move on. I'm not a big fan of spending hours on every photo and a well-shot image requires very little editing. But some of those duds represent something that I particularly wanted or needed a print of. Perhaps a key landmark from my last vacation, or a visiting relative who I photographed and promised I'd send a print to. Whatever it is, when these shots come out poorly, you have to do whatever is possible to salvage it and this is where Photoshop CS4 most earns its keep.

I won't go through all the features available in CS4, you can scan the product description in this product listing for that, or go to Adobe's web site. But they've included tools to deal with just about any situation imaginable, allowing you to do anything from reclaiming blown highlights in RAW files to stitching panoramic shots together from multiple images, to merging several shots into one to increase depth of field. About the only photo that can't be enhanced/saved is one where you failed to get a remotely correct exposure or one that suffers from motion blur. Neither Elements nor any other competing product can do anything like the heavy lifting available in CS4.

In summary, if you are serious about editing and printing top-notch photos, then you need to use Photoshop CS4. If you don't, you're spending more time than you should and leaving unfulfilled potential in your images. If you are a casual or occasional shooter, than you'll do well to stick with the less extensive products like Elements. It's cheaper, at least somewhat easier to use, and capable of generating quality work. If you end up frustrated with Elements and wishing you could do more, then you'll know it's time to reconsider moving up to CS4.

Finally, for those who can't get past the hefty price, here is a little tip. If you buy an older version of Photoshop, it can often be had for a fraction of the current version. In turn, this will allow you to buy the upgrade version of Photoshop for less than one-third the price of the full version. This is legal and does not violate the Adobe license agreement in any way. All you need is a valid license for a full version of Photoshop CS, CS2, or CS3 and you can purchase the upgrade with a combined cost well under the full version of CS4. If you attempt this, I strongly recommend buying from a reputable dealer to make sure you get a valid license. For example, if you buy at a certain well-known auction site, make sure the seller has a high feedback rating.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Having a blast!!, April 9, 2009

By	Larry A. Deforest "Larryde" (Scotts Mills, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

CS4 is my first purchase of the full version of Photoshop. I have used Paint Shop Pro since version 5, and I have used Photoshop Elements 6 for about 15 months. I have long avoided purchasing the full version of Photoshop, not because I didn't want it, but for two reasons: the price, and the proliferation of negative reviews, especially the reviews that describe installation nightmares. Two things convinced me to finally buy it: a generous coupon from Amazon, and some reviews that describe preliminary steps to avoid problems before and after installation, such as going to the website of the video card and downloading the latest drivers. My installation succeeded without a hitch. It is not my intention to indicate that those reviews about installation problems are invalid, only that my own experience was the opposite.

I was already very familiar with using selections, layers and masks, so all I have seen and heard about a 'steep learning curve' has seemed exaggerated to me. I'm having an absolute blast discovering all the convenience designed into Photoshop CS4: the non-destructive adjustment layers; Camera Raw plug-in; the quick and accurate zooming tools; the amazing preview options; Bridge and its organization capabilities. On and on I could go. I remember one review that indicated that distinguishing a Photoshop edited photo from the same photo edited by less expensive software might prove difficult or impossible. I have worked with those less expensive softwares long enough to know better than to deny the truth of that assertion. But, I believe there is much to be said about how you get there, and how much time consumption and frustration can be eliminated by learning Photoshop and availing yourself of the editing convenience designed into it. Editing that is tedious in less expensive software is downright fun in Photoshop! The reviewer also mentioned that the most difficult to edit photos, the ones where detail has to be brought out from too much shadow or too much brightness, are the ones where Photoshop has no peer. He is spot on with that assertion.

Those who assert that Photoshop is best left to the pros are consummately wrong. Serious hobbyists will find just as much satisfaction, and perhaps even more, since hobbies don't involve meeting professional deadlines and such. There is much to learn in Photoshop, but the learning is easy and fun. Resources are everywhere, many of them free.

I do very much disagree with those who trash the interface of CS4. I believe it is deliberately designed to not compete with the photo being edited. I find it to be a paragon of economy and utility: invisible when I'm concentrating on my work, yet available to quickly provide accurate tools and a convenient editing and/or reviewing environment once I decide what I'm going to do next. If editing in an interface replete with gaudy eye candy is your wont, Photoshop is not for you.

I will close with my own little disclaimer: I'm not paid by Amazon, Adobe or anyone else for my thoughts. I'm retired from all employment, and digital photography is my favorite hobby and pastime. I do it for myself, my family and my friends. I've wondered about Photoshop and wanted to try it for a long time. Thanks to the generosity of Amazon, I now own Photoshop CS4! Thanks to Adobe, I am now a true believer! I repeat, I'm having an absolute blast!

45 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disapointed in what Adobe doesn't tell you, February 27, 2009

By	C. Collins - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am very disappointed that you CANNOT upgrade from Adobe Photoshop CS4 to Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended version; EVER. After speaking with Adobe customer service (farmed in from some country that does not speak English) I was told I would have to pay an additional $999.00 for the Extended version. Or downgrade to CS3. Why on earth would anyone ever do that. I have always loved Adobe products but; Not any more. This left me with nothing but feeling angry with Adobe. They didn't even tell me I could return my product as it has only been a week since I bought it. What a lousy company and what a terrible way to do business. I used Paint Shop Pro for literally years and for the money it runs circles around Adobe in many many ways. As Photoshop is the industry standard I have no choice but to use it. In the end it is way over priced and the customer service is non existent. Before you buy Adobe make sure you absolutely need it.