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A closer look at Adobe's new Photoshop and CS4 in videos

Since announcing its new Creative Suite 4.0 product family on Tuesday, Adobe has gone on to published some videos demonstrating features of the new Mac version of Photoshop Extended, which also includes support for Multi-Touch Macs.

Multi-Touch support

Although unmentioned by Adobe in its press releases, Wired points out that Photoshop CS4 includes support for the Multi-Touch trackpads currently found on Apple's MacBook Pro and MacBook Air notebooks.

Users can reportedly pinch to zoom in and out, twist an image and also 'throw' a picture across the screen by holding down the space bar and clicking and dragging the image when it's in a zoomed state.

The end result is something akin to scrolling on the iPhone, Wired says.

Photoshop CS4 features

Meanwhile, Adobe fellow

">Russell Brown

has published a number of short video clips demonstrating other features of Photoshop CS4 Extended for the Mac, primarily those revolving around the software's new 3D capabilities.

Content-Aware Scale

Content-aware scaling is essentially a next-generation Transform tool that automatically detects the areas of complexity of an image, then only scales — or squeezes — the areas of the image with the least complexity. It's supported by a number of settings, one of which offers protection of skin tones and another that lets the user set a threshold on content-aware scales. Users can also choose to "protect" a portion of an image during a scale, producing a variety of desired results.

Spherical Panorama

Photoshop's new Spherical Panorama feature lets users project a 2D image into a 3D space, thereby wrapping the image around the inside of a sphere to create a panorama. Using supporting tools also new to Photoshop, users can stitch together a complete 360 degree walkthrough of a room.

3D Quick Look

One of the new 3D features in Photoshop CS4 Extended is the ability to change the lighting of a scene, add new lights, or delete lights that came with the original model. Another allows for painting directly onto a 3D object, where brush strokes follow the three-dimensional path of an object rather than that of a flat canvas. Meanwhile, an anaglyphic preview mode allows users to put on blue and red 3D glass to view an image in 3D on screen or via a printout.

3D Mesh from Grayscale

Another 3D feature is "3D Mesh from Grayscale," which converts 2D grayscale images into 3D objects. 3D depth maps can then be generated directly from the image itself.

3D Eclipse Animation

A third 3D feature covered in Brown's tutorial shows how a 3D solar eclipse animation can be simulated from 2D images.

Creative Suite 4.0 Feature tours

Separately, Adobe has published a number of product feature tours covering its new Design Premium, Web Premium and Production Premium bundles, as well as Photoshop CS4, InDesign CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4.

Design Premium CS4

Web Premium CS4

Production Premium CS4

Photoshop CS4

Photoshop CS4 Extended

InDesign CS4

Flash CS4

Illustrator CS4

Dreamweaver CS4

Adobe is currently taking pre-orders through its website for all of its CS4 bundles ahead of their release next month.