Photoshop CS4 or Photoshop CS64?

Well actually, Photoshop CS4 (codename Stonehenge) will be a Photoshop 64-bit version of photo-editing software but only for Windows Vista and not for the Mac OS X platform. Adobe is not trying to play favorites here, but rather it’s trying to respect Apples change they made in 2007 to their programming. Windows has been supporting 64-bit version of software since the creation of XP, but it has been moving quiet slowly as most software and hardware support 32-bit.

So what can you expect from the 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4? Well if you are talking about shear speed and not effects or interface improvements, the average user will not notice much at all. There will be some minor performance enhancements based on Adobe’s preliminary testing of about 10%. This number is based on what the average user may use Photoshop CS4 to do, such as opening a 10meg RAW picture and do some image manipulation. Now, if you are opening a large 3.2 gigapixel image and editing it, you will notice that Photoshop CS4 will outperform its 32-bit counterpart 10 times over. But let’s be honest, how many of us really do that! Now I don’t want to get ahead of myself and lead you to believe that Photoshop CS4 isn’t worth it. I have already alluded to that in my previous article Photoshop CS4 is in development, but is it worth it?. In this article I am only focusing on what Photoshop CS4 has to offer in the 64-bit version in comparison to the 32-bit version and what affect it will have on you. If you want to know more about Photoshop CS4 New Features , read the lastest article.

One of the things that Photoshop CS4 excels in is creating one picture from multiple images, whether it is a panorama or a multi-layered image. Anybody who knows Photoshop knows that it can ask a lot from your computer. If you want to boost up speed and don’t want to, or can’t run the Photoshop CS4 64-bit version, consider increasing your memory. By minimum standards, with the Photoshop CS4 32-bit version, you should consider running with no less that 4 gig’s of RAM. Most HDR, panoramic or multi-layer images will run much smoother given the extra increase in memory. Furthermore, this will also increase Photoshop’s ability to track your history of changes.

Looking back to the Photoshop CS4 64-bit version, one other area that you will want to note is that all of your plugins will have to be 64-bit as well. This my put a sour taste in a few peoples mouths as you can not mix 32-bit and 64-bit processes. Furthermore, you might also need to purchase Vista as XP will not be supported.

Bottom line here is that Photoshop CS4 has brought about some very interesting upgrades from the CS3 version, however, if you are considering purchasing the Photoshop CS4 64-bit version, make sure you are dealing with many gigapixels and/or with extremely complex High-Res images.

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