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Quoting from Webmonkey

Photoshop CS4 is something of a departure for Adobe. The previous version, Creative Suite 3, was a huge step forward — it contained the usual assortment of new features, but it also represented the first release with native support for Intel hardware on the Mac. Now that that milestone has been reached, Photoshop CS 4 concentrates less on new features and more on refinements. While there are some new bells and whistles — we’re wondering how we lived without the new Content-Aware Scaling tool now that we have it — much effort was spent on improving the behind-the-scenes code and reworking the interface.

The need for speed
Photoshop CS4, which we tested on a decked-out Mac Pro, has been given a speed boost and boasts performance enhancements that take advantage of the latest advancements in graphics processing chips. Today’s graphics cards have supercomputer-like processing powers, making them extremely fast. Photoshop takes advantage of that speed, and the results are dramatic. Even with multi-gigapixel images, zooming, rotating and moving around in an image is lightning fast and super-smooth, with almost no pixel blurring or lag time.

Also on the performance side, Windows users will be happy to hear there is a new, 64-bit version of Photoshop available. Because Apple dropped its 64-bit Carbon API before Leopard shipped, Adobe has been unable to release a 64-bit version of Photoshop on OS X. Look for that to change when Apple finally releases its API.