Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
who needs a 442 megapixel picture?

graphic artists in the print industry.

this is the kind of comment that solidifies (to an extent) my concern when a mac rumors poster asked "what system should i get for graphics". most people, even inexperienced graphic artists themselves dont realize that in the print industry a 2gig file is a common everyday pain in the rear.
 
CS4 in October? Seems like only recently that CS3 came out. I have a strong feeling that I'm about to skip a version.

Honestly, I haven't seen any compelling new features in Photoshop since 7.0. Other than bringing the program up-to-date to run on newer hardware and mangling the interface more and more with each revision, I haven't seen anything on recent versions of Photoshop that makes me think Adobe has put much thought into it. It's funny to me that Adobe is stealing customers away from Quark with InDesign because of Quark's apparent indifference to QuarkXPress, while Photoshop seems to be treated the same way.

Who knows? Maybe someone will step in and give Adobe a run for their money finally.
 
Pixelmator

I am putting my money on Pixelmator instead; designed to use the GPU from the ground up, and it works right now. Also, Universal Binary from the start.

Sure it does slighty less. It also costs a lot less and is getting much better with every new version. And the online tutorials are awesome.
 
The article doesn't say which GPU was used.

Can standard GPUs (like those in the MacBook Pro) make so much difference?

And what about the MacBook? I know it doesn't have discrete graphics, but can applications offload to its integrated graphics chip? Or is integrated graphics like not having a GPU at all?
 
I am putting my money on Pixelmator instead; designed to use the GPU from the ground up, and it works right now. Also, Universal Binary from the start.

Sure it does slighty less. It also costs a lot less and is getting much better with every new version. And the online tutorials are awesome.

In the long-run, I would bet on Pixelmator too. At some point, Adobe is going to get too big and lumbering to keep up and it's going to take someone fast and small to stay ahead of them. I've seen so many would-be Photoshop challengers come and go but Pixelmator is the first one I've seen where I think it seriously stands a chance. I would buy and use Pixelmator too but it doesn't run for crud on older hardware (still chugging away on a G4 iMac here.) However, that's the sacrifice a developer makes in the decision to stay ahead of the big corporate alternative. Still, one of the first things I will install on my next Mac is Pixelmator.

The sad thing is that if the developers behind GIMP would get off their high horse about copying Photoshop's UI, we'd already have a true competitor. I've used GIMP and it's got loads of great features, but the interface is mired in a weird mix of modern day and mid-90s-isms, and it's hard to work efficiently around such a scatterbrained approach to the tools.
 
I do

who needs a 442 megapixel picture?

I was working with a 2GB image this spring..... started out on a Mini, and -very very quickly - decided I had better get a slightly more robust system. The Mini is now attached to the stereo and acting as a jukebox. Quite literally, I could have lunch while the Mini was saving the file.... and I saved often because I was afraid of crashes ... which the Mini never did.
 
Most Photoshop professionals I know are still using the features of Photoshop 7 99% of the time.
Spot on. I'm a freelance designer and I've been using Photoshop since version 2. To be honest it's never struck me as being particularly sluggish. I'm a little cynical whenever I hear talk of 'massive speed boosts etc'. It sounds like marketing talk to me.

The current suite on the whole is poor in my opinion, and in need of a rewrite. Acrobat Pro is a dog compared to the windows version, as are Flash and Dreamweaver. I don't like the interface of Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator. Roll on CS5 ;)
 
YES, new features are needed...

Photoshop:
- Live, editable Lens Flare. Not that puny preview window... have color options too so I don't have to apply multiple layer blend modes to achieve a simple effect.

Illustrator:
- Multiple artboards in a single document, like in FreeHand.
- Color to Transparent gradients.
- PSD layer comps for the placed image like how InDesign handles that feature.
- Handle Layer masks with the simplicity and ease that Photoshop has come to be known for.
 
Hey Adobe, how about first fixing my CS3 on my PowerPC Mac. I'm crashing everyday and I'm still waiting for an update. :(
 
The article doesn't say which GPU was used.

Can standard GPUs (like those in the MacBook Pro) make so much difference?

And what about the MacBook? I know it doesn't have discrete graphics, but can applications offload to its integrated graphics chip? Or is integrated graphics like not having a GPU at all?

I assume Adobe will implement this through custom shader code, so any chip that can do shaders. The newest integrated crap from intel can do it, but anything with the older chipset probably won't. I'm not exactly sure which models have which integrated chip, but I would guess any Macbook or Mini more than about 18 months old. however, I may be completely wrong, and it may work on all recent hardware.

Anybody know the timeline for when Intel updated it's IGP to include hardware shader support?
 
Yes please Adobe add more features that are useful about once or twice a year... :rolleyes:

How about different sized pages in InDesign? Or gradients to transparency in Illustrator? Guess we'll never see these.

You are so right on. There are so many obvious things that they need to add.
 
oh no

This is good for most mbp owners but for people on a macbook this could be quite bad, unless there is a setting to make it more cpu powered than gpu powered we will just wain and see....:(
 
CS4 in October? Seems like only recently that CS3 came out. I have a strong feeling that I'm about to skip a version.

Tell me about it. I mean I do hate that I won't be able to manipulate 442-megapixel pics as fast, but I guess I can just do without.

Seriously, I don't get why they're making such a huge update not even a year later. I bought CS3 when it first came out last summer. So you're talking about a 15-month turnaround. That's extremely quick for something that costs so much. I mean is Adobe going to keep updating CS3???
 
Honestly, I haven't seen any compelling new features in Photoshop since 7.0. Other than bringing the program up-to-date to run on newer hardware and mangling the interface more and more with each revision, I haven't seen anything on recent versions of Photoshop that makes me think Adobe has put much thought into it. It's funny to me that Adobe is stealing customers away from Quark with InDesign because of Quark's apparent indifference to QuarkXPress, while Photoshop seems to be treated the same way.

Who knows? Maybe someone will step in and give Adobe a run for their money finally.

I have heard people yap about InDesign being better, but I just don't get it because I tried to use it and wanted to slit my throat. I know 1,500 keyboard shortcuts in Quark, and it seemed like none of them worked in InDesign, even when I turned the option on to use Quark shortcuts.

I think a lot of people are switching to InDesign because it's bundled with Creative Suite. I just got Quark XPress 7, which lists a lot of stuff that it's got that is supposed to steal people from Adobe. Thing is I don't really see much of them yet. Could be because we run QXP 4 at work along with Photoshop 5. Yah, we can't even export to PDF without Distiller.

Personally I like QXP better because it's what I have always used. We really don't use many special features because, well, we don't have them.
 
We use Pixelmator at our visual FX studio since it is faster than Photoshop, leaner than Photoshop, and significantly cheaper than Photoshop.

We do keep two copies of Photoshop around for Matte Painting since it is the default tool for that kind of work, but for everything else Pixelmator gets the job done very well. It also easily opens some formats that Photoshop struggles with sometimes like DPX, EXR, Cineon, etc.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.