It now offers most of the essential render settings and view controls, plus the ability to create primitives (and extend the library of primitives), necessary to work with 3D models. However, Adobe has greatly improved Extended's 3D support. For the latter, OpenGL support primarily manifests itself as some whizzy screen zooming and rotation tools that demo well but likely won't get used much. Photoshop CS4 Extended users will benefit more immediately from these underlying changes than Standard users. All of this adds up to a one-point demerit for Adobe on its Setup and Interface rating. Plus, the installation "progress" bar bears no relation to reality whatsoever, with its two steps forward and one step back movement. Even as I type it's stopped dead waiting for me to close Firefox. And as before with the updater, you'll get to relive this delightful close-your-apps-or-else experience on a regular basis. That's pretty appalling in and of itself, but in addition to wasting a large chunk of time installing, you can't do anything else but play Solitaire while it's happening. Adobe forces you to close your browser and all Microsoft Office applications, because many of the programs in the suite-primarily Acrobat-spread octopus-like tentacles throughout your working environment. Every Windows application installer suggests you close any running applications, but you can usually ignore it and 99 percent of the time everything works out fine. The Web abounds with complaints about Adobe's installer and updater, and I think most are quite justified. All things considered, while Adobe Photoshop CS4 makes some improvements over CS3, it might be worth skipping this generation and waiting for the next. If you work with 3D, Photoshop Extended is a must-have upgrade ditto if you think you'd use more of Standard's tools if the interface were less opaque, if you need to upgrade other suite applications, or if you qualify for an academic discount.
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