Adobe Photoshop CS4 Upgrade

A lot of fanfare for an upgrade which is by no means earth shattering, particularly for amateurs. Yes there is an improved interface and non destructive adjustments, but the printing, especially the picture package doesn't work on the Mac, even after you have downloaded from the main disc: English>Goodies>Automate>Picture package, as well as all the necessary Presets. Why are these programs not integrated in the initial installation?
Certainly not worth the price and a real headache for nothing.
I uninstalled my copy and went back to the CS3.

The upgrade box costs more with every upgrade but there is less in it. Amazon frequently shows what's in the box, not here, however, probably because the only thing in the box is the CD/DVD. No more printed manual. Adobe is staking back on what it delivers. Some new features, but hardly worth the price.

Warning before upgrading from an earlier version of Photoshop: Download the trial version first. Many many people, including me, are experiencing major performance problems related to the new use of the graphics card GPU. Huge lag when drawing or moving windows around, brush cursors disappearing, buggy color management and many other issues which make this release unusable. Disabling GPU acceleration, or trying some of the other workarounds suggested by Adobe, improve performance but not completely.

Not everyone is experiencing this problem, and I'm sure eventually Adobe and the graphics card makers will come up with a solution. But for now, you should first check the Adobe site to whether your graphics card is on Adobe's list of tested hardware (mine is, but I have the performance problems nevertheless), make sure all your drivers are the latest ones, and either try out the trial version first or wait until you see that Adobe has released a patch.

** UPDATE VIDEO CARD DRIVER:
Right off the bat I had a problem with my brush cursor only showing 1/4, 1/2, and even sometimes only a 1/5 of the cursor when I zoomed in. Found out from Adobe that I needed to install the latest video card driver. I had done this only a few weeks before the program was installed, but went to the EVGA site and re-downloaded the driver and re-installed it. It fixed the cursor problem upon restart. No mater what, go to your video card's website and download the latest driver, even if you think yours is updated.

** GPU and OpenGL Features and Limitations in Photoshop CS4:
Upon start-up, PS asks if you want to go to this website to review the tasks CS4 asks of the video card. I HIGHLY recommend you review it:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb404898

Very smart in how they are now tasking the video card to offload some of the processing from the CPU. If you turn off the GPU processing support (edit > preferences > performance) you will notice a small drop in performance. Read the list on the website above and you will see why you need a good fast Video card.

** 3D FEATURE NOW ADDED TO PS!:
We now have a powerful 3D rendering feature, just like Illustrator does. (But, not so powerful if you video card is lagging behind.) Turn off GPU processing, and use a weak CPU and you will find yourself making coffee during 3D rendering.

** WORKS WITH CS3:
I have both CS3 and CS4 installed at the same time. No problems using both, only you can't use them at the same time.

** NEW USER INTERFACE... UGLY:
I don't know how picked the font for the UI in CS4, but they should never be in charge of that part again. Horrible chunky font used throughout the interface. Why change from CS3? And the pallets are squared off. CS2's pallets were so nice; why change?

** Tabs and Arrange Documents:
Kind of like Dreamweaver, PS now has a tabs layout where you can see all of your open projects. So, no more hidden windows behind your project, for they are all lined up along the top of the workspace.

Arrange Documents feature: You can now quickly arrange your open projects with the click of a button at the top menu. It even has "Match Zoom", "Match Location" and "Match Zoom and Location". Cool.

** SMOOTHER:
Zooming in and out (Ctrl-/+), moving the workspace (Spacebar+click) and menus opening and closing are all smooth. Almost like a Flash-menu in the way it works.

** NO FILTER UPDATES / ADDITIONS:
As another user mentioned, we see no real additions in the bundled filter category.

** SMALL DETAILS:
Some of the small things I noticed so far:
1) PS now allows you to select "Zoom Clicked Point to Center" much the same way InDesign does automatically. Nice!
2) you can 'flick' the workspace around (called "Flick Panning"). In CS3, the workspace moved, but it certainly didn't slide to a stop as if it were floating on an air hockey table. (just a cool thing, but not a program improvement.)
3) you can assign colors to the menu options. So, now your "Save as" menu item can be green or red, and so on, if you want. You can assign a color to any and every menu item, even remove some from the list.
4) the Tools pallet stacks more items under one button (i.e. Crop and Slice tools are under the same button.) This is to accommodate the new 3D buttons on the Tools pallet.
5) I notice more changes in the "image" drop-menu than others. The 'auto' controls have moved, and some are now in the pop-up window (i.e. "auto levels" is now in the "levels" pop-up window. We now have "auto tone", "auto contrast" and "auto color" one level up from where they were before.
6) They moved the one button I used the most, Screen Mode (F), from the Tools pallet to the top. Oh well, "F, F" it is, until I get used to the new button placement.

I don't notice it taking up any more memory at idle that the CS3 edition did. It also doesn't seem to have the dreaded memory leak that plagued CS3's Photoshop. If it does, I don't notice it.

I'll keep updating this as things arise. Overall, the program works well, and has yet to crash on me.

This is a from the hip review, since I've only been using the CS4 upgrade for a few days. But folks, once again Adobe has hit the ball out of the park! I'm a longtime Photoshop user and each upgrade so far has been an improvement. This one excels primarily in its workflow improvements.
One of the simplest and most basic upgrades is that you can now keep multiple documents open as tabbed items in your window, just like on a web browser. Its easy to shift between tabs to work on multiple documents. You also have access to icons which allow you to shift between tiled windows (still in tabs!) which makes dragging and dropping images from document to document easier and more efficient.
For the artists out there, there is a new function to the hand tool. Instead of just moving your document back and forth, up and down, now you can rotate it using the hand tool as well, which makes drawing and painting much more intuitive and natural.
The entire program works more quickly and smoothly. CS3 used to hang up for awhile while loading fonts for using the text tool. CS4 does this quickly and effortlessly.
Other improvements include a simpler and more interactive bridge, improved compatibility with InDesign CS3 (which has some much more impressive and substantive improvements of its own - but thats another review!)
support for more file options.
I'll update this review as I get more into the deep changes in the program, but from this early taste I'll say its well worth the investment.