I can’t count on an abacus how many times I’ve messed up a great picture while using low shutter speeds. Thankfully, Adobe is at it again looking to push boundaries and change the landscape of digital photography forever. During last week’s MAX 2011 conference held in Los Angeles, Adobe gave a sneak preview of a more »

The tools offered in Adobe’s Creative Suite are incredibly useful, and there are many people who rely ont he software for their careers. For those of us who don’t always need Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator of any of the other apps in the suite, the price is just far too much. If you don’t want to more »

For many people, Adobe Photoshop is very pricey and has features that they will never use. That’s why Adobe has its Photoshop Elements software. Today, Adobe announced Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for both OS X and Windows. Elements 8 will cost $99 for either platform, but Adobe is running a promotion that brings the price more »

Adobe’s Photoshop.com web app just got some new features. Now users can upload video and create Group Albums. There are limitations on video uploads: if you upload via the web app, videos must be no larger than 200MB. If you upload using the Adobe AIR Uploader, videos can be up to 2GB. That’s quite a difference in size restriction — maybe Adobe is trying to push Adobe AIR apps to more people. Keep in mind that there is a 2GB of storage on Photoshop.com for free. Once you upload a video, it must be converted so it can be played on Photoshop.com.

If you’re feeling a monetary crunch, there’s no need to hit up Pirate Bay for your software. Welcome to “UnPirate.” We’ll be taking a look at the top pirated apps on Pirate Bay and try to find you alternatives. Today, we turn to Adobe Photoshop.

I just unboxed and installed Adobe Photoshop CS4, so I’m ready to offer some first impressions on the PC version.

Speed

Photoshop CS4 seems a lot faster than previous versions. There are many things that frustrated me in CS3 that no longer are present. In CS3, it was kind of clunky when you wanted to drag a window outside of the main Photoshop window, but in CS4 it’s quick and fluid like you would expect.

Another performance boost that I noticed is the menu system. The menus in Photoshop are huge, due to the insane amount of filters and features they provide, so it’s easy to see why the menu system could be a bit sluggish. Right away, I noticed that the menus load immediately, and the application launches a lot quicker.

Keep reading for more on the new CS4.

Over the years that Adobe Photoshop has had to mature into a professional product, it has gained impressive features with each new release. The release of Photoshop CS3 is no exception. Before I get into the details of the software, I must disclaim – I tested it on a Dell laptop with 1GB of RAM, and an 1.86 Ghz Intel Pentium M processor. Any issues with performance that I mention may very well be due to my PC, and not the software itself. Now that I got that out of my system, lets get the show on the road.

Panels

With the release of CS3 comes many user interface enhancements. One of the most frequently used ones are the new Panels. Similar to previous versions of Photoshop, Panels are the tool boxes on your screen that hold the most frequently used options and styles – such as Layers, Paths, Swatches, and Channels.

The improvement of these tools not only is due to the content in the Panels, but also how you manage their appearance in your “workspace”. Similar to the older Macromedia products such as Dreamweaver, you can now click the arrows in the top right of the Panel to make them minimize. This is extremely helpful for those of us that do not have gigantic monitors, and need to get those Panels out of the way so we can work with an image. Here are a few screenshots of the different ways you can view your Panels: