Photokina announcements and new Photoshop CS4

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Photokina announcements and new Photoshop CS4

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 | Photos, Tech |

The Photokina photography show is this week in Cologne. Digital Photography Review has a roundup of news.

Lots of cameras and lenses debuted, but the big software news was version 4 of Adobe’s Creative Suite, including Photoshop CS4. Wired and Macworld have previews. There’s also an extended version of CS4 with more 3D features.

CS4 uses your video card’s graphics processor unit (GPU) to accelerate many operations. Besides just speeding things up, Adobe has used the new-found speed to make some preview operations available that weren’t practical before. For instance, instead of typing scaling factors into a dialog box and waiting for the results you can now scale images up and down in a live preview by dragging your mouse.

CS4 is available in a 64-bit version. With 32-bit operating systems and 32-bit processors you’re limited to 4 GB of RAM. No matter how cheap RAM becomes or how much you can afford, a 32-bit operating system can only address 4 GB of the stuff. (2³² = 4,294,967,296 bytes, which is 4 Gigabytes.)

In theory a 64-bit operating system you can address up to 17.2 billion gigabytes of RAM, though 64-bit versions of Windows are limited to 128 GB and most 64-bit processors also have limitations.

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