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Upgrading Photoshop is expensive and some may wonder if it is worth upgrading to Adobe Photoshop CS4. If you’ve been trying to determine whether to upgrade to Photoshop CS4 look first at the new features listed on the official adobe Photoshop site. One great new feature the use GPU and OpenGL acceleration (to ordinary people this means Photoshop should be much quicker). A GPU is dedicated to calculations needed for graphics. OpenGL tells your GPU what it is working with and how to manipulate it. It will make your Graphics Card do some of the work your central processing system used to do.
To make use of the new GPU accelerations, your graphics card must have a minimum of 128 MB of memory and support OpenGL 2.0 along with something called Shader Model 3.0. If you’re not sure if you’ve got all these, Photoshop CS4 can tell you.
- Go to Edit >> Preferences >> Performance and look for the check box for “GPU Settings.”
- If your GPU qualifies, the model will be listed and the box will be checked.
- If this area is blank, Photoshop doesn’t think your system has what it takes.
- If you think you do have a GPU that is up to the task, make sure your video driver is updated.
With GPU acceleration enabled, the experience of using Photoshop is greatly improved. Now when you zoom in and out, the size of everything changes evenly smoothly and, the view remains sharp at all magnification ratios. When you zoom above 500% you can now turn on a pixel grid view that outlines single pixels so you can see what you are editing.
If you hold down the H key (active the hand tool) then left mouse click on your image you can activate the “Bird’s Eye View” feature to show you where you are at. The view will zoom out to display you the total image and a bounding box appears centered where you clicked, move your mouse around and the box will follow. Let go and the image will zoom back into the scale you were at previously but at the new location. These tools are smooth and fast.
Holding down the space bar allows you to “flick” scroll the image with your mouse, by clicking and dragging in the direction you want to scroll and the image.
If you’re already using Photoshop and wish to upgrade to CS4 and your graphics card doesn’t support this feature, get a new graphics card.
