why?
A short experience - review:

I started working with digital photomanipulation and painting software, with the Amigav 500, somewhere in the beginning of the nineties, with a tool called "Deluxe paint"
with Photoshop later since version 5.5 and even more later with version 7 until now.

For about 2 years i have build my workhorse, a Chieftec server rack  filled with an Abit aw9d max -board, 2 gigs of dual channel ram and 2,4gh dualcore(overclocked to 2 x 3,0 ghz)
and around 1tb hd ´s and a overclocked- xfx-geforce 7600 gt -which is now a stable setup, and can also called common -when it comes to a working environment on an x86 -basis.

For over a week now, i have played and tried to work with the available trial of Adobe Photoshop cs4 while planning to buy a legal standard German-version of it, after the German release.

One long anticipated feature at least for me, was the "direct-rotation tool", that makes it possible to work smooth and rotate images for painting  strikes and lines easier -or naturally, like in painter.
The other one, was the Seam carving option - called "CAS-content aware scaling" function, both functions are worth to buy at least the standard version of PS CS4.

If it would work smooth, thats the point, where the positive minded reader should stop.

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My experience is based on the above called setup, and is comparable to a macintosh G5 from 2006.
(where the geforce card was an optional hardware)
A piece i was working on, which measured about 5000X9000 pixels at 300 dpi and 16 bit/channel and about 3 layers.

Photoshop cs4 opens as similar quick as the version 7, thats something better than the other 3 versions,so far so good.

The annoying part is that i have to update driver for the Nvidia card. done, so far so good.

After reboot and restart of the programm, Photoshop tells me, that something in the openGL setup makes problems, and therefore this feature is disabled.
I hate openGL, didn´t anyone else?
Since the beginning of creating 3d-engines for games, there was directx and opengl...opengl almost always crashed.
Its nice to use one API to have it working crossplatform, but for the money they going to earn, it would be not too much to work with directx.

- On a sidenote, when a game crashes, its not a big problem, but when in a working environment, functions disbling themselves and programms crashes, it isn´t worth the money .
- And on the other hand, people that buy graphiccards for about 800 euro, didn´t spend the money on apps for 1000euro, the spent 1000 euro on games.

People who work with 2d tools, like me, did invest in a stable and functional graphics -card, not a gaming card-but that is what Adobe Photoshop CS4 is requiring now!

What about the Matrox cards? With almost no or minimum of 3d acceleration?

Working on and off, the programm crashes 3 times, when trying to use a lens-filter, a blur and a smart -sharpen filter.
3 reasons to not install this programm, if you need these features.
Sure Photoshop 7 crashes here and there, but mostly there were other reasons for that, and it kept itself from a hang, when the users waits a little while -everything was perfectly back in position -
i havn´t seen such a stable tool in ages.

PS 7 didn´t crash in a 48 hour session, with keeping images in standby mode, having three browsers open in the background and mediaplayers brning tool and various other image programms, like faststone.
and i have saved the first time after 48 hours!

Even in 8bit per channel, the programm is slow like hell when saving an image, its nice that the program saves a seperate composite image,
for lfp purpose and such, waiting 2 minutes for such a small image isn´t very promising.

The "content aware scaling" function din´t even work, as it keeps saying "there is not enough ram"!!
Ok, i thought the image was to large, but even with 72 dpi and a resolution of 1700 x 1200 pixels are to big to proceed, not even when flatten th image...not enough ram-
sad, that in windows xp, not more than 3 gigs are allocated from the system- another reason to deinstall.

After retouching and refusing to restart, because of the disbled opengl-features - i had to put the pc in standby-mode
something i do often, when i have to do a break, or something else.
When getting back to the piece, i found out that scrolling and moving with the hand-tool is nearly impossible, without having samples like artifacts disturbing the view of the zoomed image.

The problem i assume, is that the use of the graphics-card memory results in a problem with multitasking or other windows-based actions.

All in all, it was a horrible nightmare.


yours Fant






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