Anyone picking up Photoshop CS4?

[Rman]

The GPU acceleration makes this one very tempting to pick up.  More wallet rapage for me this October.  Anyone here got this already?  I would like to hear some impressions. 

[TVC15]

I'll wait for the first big patches and then pirate it.

[fistfulofmetal]

CS4?! I just pirated CS3!

[BlueTsunami]

Holy fucking shit, GPU Acceleration? I was actually talking to myself one day and was all like "Why don't they impliment GPU acceleration in Photoshop". Are there any benchmarks for how this will effect the speed of PS?

[Rman]

Holy fucking shit, GPU Acceleration? I was actually talking to myself one day and was all like "Why don't they impliment GPU acceleration in Photoshop". Are there any benchmarks for how this will effect the
 speed of PS?

Here's some info.  I couldn't find any benchmark info, tho.   

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15571

[Vizzys]

heres what i found

GP GPU acceleration only applies to certain components of CS4, but I noticed that CS4 loads about 20% faster on my Gateway GT5628 (Core 2 Quad Q6600, 3 GB memory, 1 TB HDD, Nvidia GeForce 8500GT) than CS3, which indicates that the program code has been overhauled. Some components, such as image blending, also worked noticeably faster.         

also cool

But it is much more lightweight than CS3 and improved in key areas. For example, multiple image files are now organized in tabs in the main window – much like you are using tabs in a web browser. It takes some time getting used to, but switching between full-size windows simply via tabs is a very effective addition and I don’t want to miss it anymore, even if Adobe could have gone all the way and included tab grouping for users who may open dozens of images at the same time.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39433/140/

page 2 goes deep into gpu accel. actually

[Arbys Roast Beef Sandwich]

Will wait if I can get a student license for it.

Otherwise, will probably pirate.

[BlueTsunami]

Seems like GPU acceleration is only for Rotating and Zooming picture. Sucks that it isn't for filters and other pixel work but this should help with super large res Photographs.

Here's the excerpt with that info...

1. GPU acceleration and 64-bit. Depending on your view, this new feature may be exciting or disappointing. The bad news is that only canvas rotating and zooming support GPU acceleration. Adobe said it will make additional features available, such as the “Pixel Bender” component, which did not make it into the final version. The good news is that we finally see GPGPU acceleration in a commercial application and see more horsepower to deal with those huge image files. Combine this feature with 64-bit support and lots of RAM and you could see dramatic performance improvements beyond a factor of 10. Adobe, by the way, said that both AMD/ATI and Nvidia graphic cards will provide (OpenGL-based) acceleration, as long as a graphics card has at least 128 MB of memory.

Our review was limited to the 32-bit version, but the performance jump was obvious. We used an 80 megapixel (22.300 x 3600 pixels) picture with a file size of 720 MB and found that zooming worked as smooth as it does in a 3 megapixel image, while it was painful to do the same in CS3. Canvas rotation saw some delay, usually two to three seconds. However, this performance translates into a 6x improvement over CS3. We were told that a GPGPU-accelerated filter called Pixel Bender with GPGPU support will be offered as a free download from Adobe Labs for CS4 in the near future.

Also, lol at 500+% Zoom. Your can actually manipulate the picture at a pixel level that looks to be 1:1 or something. Wow

[BlueTsunami]

Holy shit, they've implemented "Stacking" of layer which will be tremendous for "Focus Stacking". This allows you to take various shots of one scene at different focusing distances. Then take all the images, bring them together and be able to bring more objects in focus than your camera will allow (at certain apertures).

A great use of this is to take a very close up picture of say, a flower. Even at a wide Aperture, some background will be thrown out of focus. You take two shots, one of the flower in focus, one of the background in focus. Throw it in CS4, stack them together and Photoshop will merge them images to create a final image that has the whole scene in focus. Will basically do what a Tilt Shift lens does!

[jiji]

I'll be making use of my education discount for this. I'm not sure if I'll go for just Photoshop or for the master suite.