Adobe Photoshop CS4 Veteran set of powerful imaging tools streamlined user interface more extensible and customizable; completely overhauled 3D engine in Extended version. If you work with 3D, Photoshop Extended is a must-have upgrade; ditto if you think you'd use more of Standard's tools if the interface were less opaque, if you need to upgrade other suite applications, or if you qualify for an academic discount. All things considered, while Adobe Photoshop CS4 makes some improvements over CS3, it might be worth skipping this generation and waiting for the next. There's just enough that's better in the CS4 updates to Photoshop and Photoshop Extended most notably, usability improvements for core features that many people will find themselves sighing, biting the bullet, and upgrading. If you work with video or 3D, or want to update your Creative Suite to CS4 for other reasons, this is a no brainer; for the rest of us, there's little you can do with CS4 that you couldn't do with CS3, and the latter seems a bit faster and more memory efficient in some respects.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended users will benefit more immediately from these underlying changes than Standard users. For the latter, OpenGL support primarily manifests itself as some whizzy screen zooming and rotation tools that demo well but likely won't get used much. However, Adobe has greatly improved Extended's 3D support. It now offers most of the essential render settings and view controls, plus the ability to create primitives (and extend the library of primitives), necessary to work with 3D models. You edit and paint on textures simply by double-clicking on them in the Layers palette, then see your changes applied when you toggle back to the model; not quite real-time, interactive painting, but close enough for now. And now there's basic keyframe animation for 3D scenes. Still there's room for improvement: it needs better lighting handling and the ability to tile and more easily position textures, and several aspects of the interface, like the Rendering options, are still far too dialog driven. And Photoshop gets very slow when you load (or generate via the Mesh from grayscale command) relatively complex models with tens of thousands of polygons.
That mixture of real-time and dialog-driven still permeates the interface of Photoshop in general, despite some advances. For example, if you use Photoshop for Web or print production work, the move to modeless Adjustment and Masks panels for real-time adjustments and previewing of changes in mask feathering and density is potentially a huge time-saver. But all the ancillary operations, such as the Radius, Contrast, Smooth, (another) Feather, and Contract/Expand parameters controlled by Refine Mask, remain in a modal dialog box.
So while there are a few tweaks, such as the new tabbed windows (you can still float them, though) and jarring all-caps text, long-time users won't encounter a lot to slow down their workflow. On the upside, tool shortcut keys now behave in what Adobe refers to as a "spring loaded" fashion. That means that if you hold down the shortcut key for one tool while another is selected in the toolbar, it temporarily overrides the toolbar until you release the key. Very nice. On the other hand, I don't particularly like the iconic representations of the adjustments in the new panel — you can't tell what they are without mousing over them and reading the text — but you can just ignore them and use the adjustment layer pop-up on the Layers palette as always.
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