Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended Our Price $109.95 Vendor: Adobe Category: Graphics Software and Suites Retail Price: $999.00 You Save: $889.05

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Overview

Digital images are everywhere—from the photography studio to the X-ray lab, from the glossy magazine to your website. With two new versions and a heap of new features and enhancements, wherever great digital images are found, Photoshop is there.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 refines and redefines the professional image-editing experience, with faster, nondestructive ways to accomplish core tasks like image adjustments and masks, and new tools and enhancements that let you work more easily, efficiently, and naturally.

Photoshop CS4 Extended starts with the complete set of features found in Photoshop CS4, and adds others designed specifically for professionals working with specialized image types and multimedia workflows. With breakthrough 3D editing and compositing features, richer motion-graphics capabilities, and enhanced image analysis functions, Photoshop CS4 Extended broadens your reach beyond traditional digital images.

With Photoshop CS4 Extended, you get

Unrivaled editing power. New Adjustments and Masks panels slash the time it takes you to make nondestructive color and tone adjustments, and to create and re-edit feathered, density-controlled pixel and vector masks. With on-image controls and presets, there's less time mousing between settings. Fine modifications are faster and easier with additions like the new Vibrance adjustment layer and enhanced Color Range mask creation. And Content-Aware Scaling is the revolutionary new feature that automatically recomposes an image as you resize it, smartly preserving vital areas as it adapts to the new dimensions.

Increased productivity. Work more efficiently and naturally with fluid, natural canvas rotation, enhanced pan and zoom tools, and effortless large-image navigation. Vastly improved Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools let you intelligently and accurately adjust the exposure and color of image areas using simple brush strokes. Photoshop CS4 tools combine increased power and finer control with easier, more naturally controlled effects to boost productivity, no matter how you work with digital images.

Breakthrough 3D, motion graphics, and image analysis capabilities. In Photoshop CS4 Extended, you can now work with 3D objects and video frames as easily as with any traditional image. Paint directly on 3D objects. Combine 2D layers and video files into 3D layers. Easily convert any image into a 3D object or volume. And do it all with a brand new 3D engine that provides dramatic performance and capability improvements. In motion graphics, single-key shortcuts let you move through and edit video layers faster and more precisely than before, and new controls enable you to preview and export audio tracks as well. Image analysis improvements include multiple counts with the Count tool and volume rendering of DICOM files.

Top new features in 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.

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° 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.

Content-Aware Scaling

Imagine you have an image that is ideal for a new project, except the proportions are wrong. Maybe it's a full-frame 8x12-inch photograph you want to fit into an 8x10-inch frame, or a 8x10-inch image you want to crunch down to a panoramic, without sacrificing the people or important background. Up to now, getting these results was so time-consuming a process that it was virtually impossible. With Content-Aware Scaling, the near-impossible becomes the near-instantaneous success. Content-Aware Scaling is the revolutionary new feature in Photoshop CS4 that lets you resize and recompose simultaneously, with no more effort than it takes you to simply resize an image. As the name implies, the feature analyzes the image in the background while you adjust it, and intelligently recomposes the scene to preserve the most visually interesting areas. Content-Aware Scaling automatically recognizes skin tones to keep people from being squeezed out of the shot, and for more fine-grained control, selection tools let you easily define the most important areas before you begin scaling.

To begin, simply select any unlocked layer in a Photoshop document, and then either choose Edit > Content-Aware Scale, or press Command-Option-Shift-C (Mac OS X) or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-C (Windows). Resize the image by dragging the corner or side controls, exactly as if you were doing a crop or free transform. If you want to define a protection area first, use any selection tool to select the vital area, then choose Select > Save Selection to save it as a new alpha channel. Choose a saved selection from the Protect menu to constrain the new composition when you adjust the image with Content-Aware Scaling.

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 "toss" 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.

Breakthrough 3D editing and compositing

With Photoshop CS4 Extended, you can now work with 3D models as easily and powerfully as you can 2D images, without navigating dialog boxes and special layer contents. For the first time, you can paint directly on 3D models, easily convert 2D images or gradient maps into 3D objects, and convert layers into volumes. Wrap a flat design onto a 3D object by merging the 2D layer directly onto your 3D layer. Merge two different 3D layers into a single scene. You can even use video layers as textures, to turn any 3D object into a video display zone. Basic presets will speed the process of turning two-dimensional designs into common 3D shapes such as spheres and cylinders. You can also export 3D layers directly to the OBJ, KMZ, Collada, and U3D file formats. It all means that every creative professional can now take immediate advantage of three-dimensional assets created in today's high-end modeling applications, and use them in their 2D mock-ups and composites. The 3D engine has been rebuilt from the ground up to provide dramatically faster performance; allow editing of properties like lights, materials, and cameras; and create more realistic renderings with a new high-quality ray tracer.

Enhanced motion graphics

Adobe Photoshop is an essential part of the motion graphics workflow, and Photoshop CS4 Extended makes that workflow more efficient than ever, starting with the enhanced preview of non-square-pixel images. Easily preview and export the audio content of a video file as well as its frame comments. New keyboard shortcuts are enabled for the Animation panel to make fast work of editing between frames and keyframes. You can now animate the 3D object and camera position, render settings, and cross-sections, bringing new depth to motion-graphics editing. When working with 3D objects, you can even place video layers into your textures, turning any 3D object surface into a video display screen. Especially for film and television professionals, Adobe After Effects® CS4 can now directly read and import 3D layers from Photoshop CS4 files.

Volume Rendering

Volume Rendering is a new way to easily convert text, shape, or pixel layers into a volume. Artists can combine painted layers into entirely new and eye-catching 3D volumes. Motion graphics professionals can quickly turn text layers into animated 3D text. Medical professionals can volume render a DICOM image stack into a 3D anatomical image that can be viewed and explored from all angles and depths. Whether the goal is creative or scientific, Photoshop CS4 Extended adds exciting new capabilities with Volume Rendering.

Easier data collection and analysis with the Count tool

Allowing fast, simple, point-and-click tallying of objects in scientific images, the Count tool is expanded in Photoshop CS4 Extended to allow for multiple counts, as well as separate colors for each count. This data is easily saved into the file for future reference, and can be collected in the Measurement Log panel for comparison and export to standard text files.

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.

System Requirements

• 1.8GHz or faster processor
• Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended) or Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (certified for 32-bit Windows XP and 32- and 64-bit and Windows Vista)
• 512MB of RAM (1GB recommended)
• 1GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on flash-based storage devices)
• 1,024x768 display (1,280x800 recommended) with 16-bit video card
• Some GPU-accelerated features require graphics support for Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0
• DVD-ROM drive
• QuickTime 7.2 software required for multimedia features
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services