Adobe says that Photoshop keeps its editing history in RAM for as long as possible, too, so even if you’re working with smaller images but making lots of edits to them, allocating more RAM will help you in that situation as well. Obviously, most people don’t need that sort of capability, but many professional photographers shoot with large- or medium-format cameras with digital backs that can capture nearly 40 megapixels or even higher, and they often create much larger compositions. In the 64-bit version, I was able to create and work with an image of 45,000 pixels by 45,000 pixels, for a total of a little over 2000 megapixels and a 5.6GB file size. The amounts will vary depending on your system, especially your graphics card.

I was able to set the 64-bit version to take up 6879MB of RAM, and to set the 32-bit version to consume 3185MB of RAM. Photoshop requires that you manually allocate a specific amount of RAM to it, rather than its acquiring the RAM on the fly. I tested betas of both the 32- and 64-bit versions of Photoshop CS4 by installing them on a workstation with dual Intel Xeon CPUs, running Windows Vista 64-bit and 8GB of RAM. With the shrinking amount of RAM available to modern PCs (due to a 4GB limit on 32-bit Windows versions and those operating systems’ increasing hunger for RAM), that’s a significant update.

The 64-bit edition will allow PCs with lots of RAM to work on very large images with less hard-disk swapping (ideally, no swapping at all), thus speeding up operations. Adobe’s new Photoshop CS4 packs a ton of fresh features and an updated interface, which alone make it a worthy upgrade for existing users.īut the big news is that Photoshop now comes in both 32- and 64-bit Windows Vista versions.

View cs4 key on adobe