Photoshop CS 4 Review

Content Aware Scaling

The biggest, splashiest, most jaw dropping new feature is "Content Aware Scaling"--exactly what it does is a bit difficult to describe, but easy to see. Here are three examples:

ORIGINAL	SCALED
The easiest, and most convincing transformation, changing a general landscape shot at the typical digital camera format of 6x4.5 into a square format.	The principal points of interest, the ships, are left intact, while less obvious things, such as the water and the trees and shrubs, and edited.
ORIGINAL	SCALED
A somewhat trickier problem, which requires a bit more of a complex set of steps, transforming typical landscape digital format...	into a portrait format, while preserving the person. I should have preserved the potted plant too.

ORIGINAL	SCALED
Temples at Paestum, transforming a long panorama into a more squarish format. This also turns out to be a bit tricky, to avoid obvious distortion--we know what buildings look like!	So again, it requires protecting certain areas to prevent visually unfortunate results.

To see how to do this sort of scaling, take a look at this tutorial by Deke McClelland. While this tutorial is on YouTube, and thus free, it is from the tutorial collection at Lynda.com, where there are many video tutorials, for a subscription fee. I know at least one person who subscribes and thinks it more than worth the money.

And for a truly perverse use of this process, take a look HERE. No, vanity did not prompt me to come up with this idea--I summarized my view on Content Aware Scaling by saying that it was really cool and all, but I could not think of many occasions where one would really have a use for it, and so it did not strike me as being worth the 200 bucks to upgrade. That's when Paulette chimed in with the thought that one could use it as a virtual weight loss program....

High Dynamic Range and Depth of Field

I'm lumping these two together because they both involve Photoshop doing all sorts of complex blending of things automatically. Evidently HDR is all the rage among some people. I was unable to come up with an example to show how it works because you MUST use a tripod to shoot, and I didn't feel like digging it out and setting it up (the shots I tried hand-held really would not work). Plus, my camera requires that you use manual focus for bracket shots of any kind, and the view you get is the size of my thumbnail and requires pushing two buttons simultaneously. I'm not that dextrous, and my eyesight, even with reading glasses on, just isn't good enough to tell whether the thing is in focus or not. For a reasonable looking view of HDR and what it does, and how to do it, see HERE. For an unreasonable view of HDR photography, see HERE. Personally, I think even the most reasonable examples are over the top. The best one I've seen is this:

I found it being used as a banner on one of the pages at Photoshopsupport.com. And even that one, while spectacular enough, looks a bit surreal. But perhaps I'm just an old fogey....well, yeah. I am, come to think about it. Anyway, I would probably not use this feature, so once again I am not tempted to fork over more money to Adobe.

The extended depth of field function does interest me, and the results are not so "fake" looking to me. Again, to get really good results you need a tripod, and there is the pesky manual focus problem with my camera. Here's an example where I did get a good focus for the background, and almost got one right the for mid- and foreground as well:

	To the left is the combined, blended result. Photoshop uses the best focus from both shots. Below is another version, less successful with the focus, more typical of what I got.

I have also been trying out the various functions in Adobe Bridge CS 4, and discovered that it will output a flash based web page. I used a number of the Locke figurine photos I had worked on in CS4, featured above, to experiment with Bridge's automatic web page creation. You can see the result HERE. It is possible to choose from a number of different layouts, and customize things a little bit. It is also extremely easy to use.

NEXT: Masks, Adjustment Layers, and Summary

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