Photoshop CS4 released on September 23rd

The British Journal of Photography is reporting that Adobe plan to release the CS4 version of Photoshop at Cologne’s Photokina trade fair on September 23rd.

Whilst we don’t yet know what new tricks CS4 will have up its sleeve, you might want to cast your eyes down this list to see what popular requests Photoshop users have been making.

My personal favourites are:

#452 The world is global now. Please fix your pricing. Thank you.

#400 Make my 2009 Photoshop faster than Photoshop 3.5.

#419 Remember when your applications were lightning fast? I miss that.

#516 Please stop forcing your PDF plug-ins into every orifice of OS X. Apple designed Preview for a reason. [expletive deleted] deal with it.

Whilst we might enjoy moaning about Photoshop and the uninvited extras that Adobe insist upon installing (Adobe Updater anyone?), we should probably remember that it’s been a killer app as far as digital photo manipulation is concerned. Where would we be now without layers and masks? Well, we’d be in Lightroom probably but you know what I’m saying.

Talking of Lightroom, I’m guessing that a Photoshop upgrade is less important to working photographers that it might have been just a couple of years ago. I know that Photoshop accounts for only about 5% of my workflow time now with Lightroom carrying the bulk of the burden. And just to round up that thought, I use Expression Media for my cataloguing needs as Lightroom, whatever else it may do, still isn’t a fully-featured DAM (Digital Asset management) application.

So, there’s much to look forward to at Photokina. News of what will be included in CS4 together with the long-awaited replacement to Canon’s 5D. Expectations of both will be high although rumours of the introduction of an “un-suck” filter in Photoshop are, sadly, unfounded.