How To: Dive into new features of Photoshop CS4

Pixel Perfect is the "perfect" show to help you with your Photoshop skills. Be amazed and learn as master digital artist Bert Monroy takes a stylus and a digital pad and treats it as Monet and Picasso do with oil and canvas. Learn the tips and tricks you need to whip those digital pictures into shape with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. In this episode, Ben shows you how to dive into new features of Photoshop CS4.

- A cleanup of the bridge interface
- Performance feature updates (what makes it run faster and feel better) - taking advantage of the GPU (graphics processor). John demonstrates a few things with a 442 megapixel image.
- Spring loaded keys
- Canvas rotation
- Tabs in the Photoshop interface
- Application frame that helps isolate your creative space
- The adjustments panel to take the best practices and bring them front and center
- Camera Raw (over 200 formats natively supported inside of Photoshop)
- Simple painting and graduated filer/gradient tools inside the RAW environment (the cool thing about doing it in RAW is that all the settings are non-destrictive - same as some of the features in Adobe Lightroom)
- Dial in adjustments using brushing tools in camera RAW
- A plugin called pixel bender that harnesses the power of the GPU to let you do a ton of things on the fly (look for the pixel bender at labs.adobe.com)
- Applying photos as a texture onto a 3D surface
- 3D navigator tool for rotating on multiple axes
- Controlling lights and sources of light in 3D images
- Painting Directly on 3D surfaces
- Mixing 2D and 3D together - applying 2D imagery to a 3D environment
- Auto-blending in Panoramic Photo Stitching. Photoshop CS4 stitches images with auto blending, which eliminates vignette rippling in panoramic photos - a huge step up from CS3.

Search Pixel Perfect on WonderHowTo for more Photoshop episodes from this Revision3 show.