-----------JOURNAL--------------

Just got my grubby little mits on the trial version of Photoshop CS4. It's not officially out yet, but some clever person managed to figure out where it was being kept in Adobe's website and extracted it early
Anyone can torrent it, without worrying about legal issues since it's a free 30 day trial.

I've been using it for a good few hours now, and in general... what an awesome upgrade! The first genuine step-up for a good number of versions (we've not had much more than a facelift since Photoshop 9 imo). It uses the GPU to accelerate processing and allow awesome things like smooth scaling & scrolling (with simulated momentum!), smoother image processing, and even real-time canvas rotation... like turning a piece of paper to a slightly different angle to make it easier to draw.
Content-aware scaling rocks like you'd have to see to believe, and there are a lot of other little improvements (like tabbed browsing of open files) that also rock. I haven't even started digging to find out the smaller changes yet.

Major disappointment on the 64 bit support though. I was all excited about the prospect of exploiting all 8 gigs of RAM I have available (rather than the <4 that CS3 and CS4 32bit can address), but the 64bit version of Photoshop CS4 is buggy as hell and crashes every 30 seconds in a bewildering variety of situations as soon as I start handling complex files. It's essentially completely unusable (at least with my hardware setup) so I'm sticking with the 32bit version which so far hasn't crashed once, and seems pretty stable. This sucks (especially since I bought the extra RAM partly in anticipation of the 64bit nature of CS4) but there are enough new features to keep me smiling, and my workflow feels a lot more streamlined even without the boost that would come from 64bit resources. Let's hope Adobe sort out the 64bit support as soon as possible, or they're gonna come under some serious fire for releasing prematurely.

-----------MY ARTWORK-------------
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