articles/Photoshop/adobecreativeuitecs4-page4
by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2009
Open GL Interface
Under Edit>Preferences>Performance you will find a check box to activate 'Open GL Drawing'. The name of the installed graphics card is also displayed here and a check on the Adobe website for a compatibility list presently shows nine Mac cards, 21 nVidia and 13 ATI cards. With Open GL you no longer have to put up with jaggies at the non-integer magnifications (typified by 33.3% and 67%) and the magnification may be seamlessly ramped up and down. This should have benefits when judging sharpening which has always been a tricky issue, limited to 100% and 200% magnifications - it will bear some intense investigation for a later article! Open GL also brings a cute ability to rotate your image on screen so that it is not aligned with the edges. This is identical to turning your sketching paper on an angle when using real, lead pencils. With an image rotated on screen, holding the Shift key down still constrains the brushes and other tools to the orthogonal directions - that is straight up and down or side to side, but actually on the slant on the image (see screen grab). People doing a lot of tricky masking would find use for this feature.
Drag Brush Adjustment
We assume because of the Open GL, changing the brush size is now very much quicker (instantaneous in fact!). However, the really clever bit is that if you hold Alt-Ctrl and Right Click you see a mimic of you brush and you can drag it larger or smaller. Holding the Shift key as well makes the brush harder or softer.
Only time and continued use will tell us if this is better than using the square brackets.
Preview for the Rubber Stamp Tool
This is a very useful feature as you can see what you are likely to get from a cloning operation. It takes just a sentence to describe but has a value far beyond that!
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