Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be 64-Bit For Windows Only

HighWizard notes that Adobe Systems has shared the first scrap of information about its next version of Photoshop, CS4, and it's a doozy: there will be a 64-bit version of the photo-editing software, but only for Windows Vista and not for Mac OS X. Ars explains the history of how this conundrum came to pass — blame Apple and/or Adobe as you will.

Comments

64 bit is no panacea

[jgarra23]

just like the article says, it's not like it's going to make your app run any faster. In fact, with tday's machines, 64 bit will probably run slower than 32 bit...

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[joaommp]

Well, it will run faster if you have a large pool of physical memory and do some heavy Photoshop editing, because Photoshop will be able to access more than 3GB of memory (remember that 1GB of the 4GB address space is already reserved for system code sharing) and not resort to it's own swap/disk cache system as much.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Kjella]

Yep, and memory prices have dropped *extremely* over the last year. If I was working with many and large photoshop images, getting 4x4GB memory wouldn't be out of the question. Honestly I don't need it, but if you're working with high-quality print images I can easily see why you might need that...

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[elrous0]

32 bits is just fine...until the day that Apple announces better 64-bit developer support, at which time it will immediately become the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[alta]

Unless I'm mistaken the only thing 64bit color has to do with 64bit processing is that they both start with the number 64.

64Bit will allow the computer to deal with more data at a time, no matter what the color depth of the file is... It'll let the program have more memory. That will help a 64bit image if it's BIG, but just because it's BIG, not because it's 64 bit.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[larkost]

Apple has already announced (and shipped with 10.5.0) better 64bit support, but just not for Carbon. And since all of Adobe's products (except Lightroom) are Carbon applications, they have no access to GUI-integrated (single process) 64bit support.

Adobe has been dragging its feet on a port to Cocoa (about which everyone saw the writing on the wall a long time ago), aided by Apple's thinking that it was going to give 64bit Carbon a future (rescinded quite some time ago). I don't know why this is at all surprising to anyone.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Anonymous Coward]

you should inform college graduates then. we hire them all the time, full time, interns you name it. among the list of many skills like, word, excel, powerpoint, googling effectively, etc...photoshop is in there too.

you don't know photoshop, you're not getting hired. period.

we have a bank of macs, and we have several little tests that we've setup.

adobe would LIKE everyone to believe that their application is the EXPENSIVE HEAVY DUTY PAINT APP.

I'd say it's a paint app that remains expensive and hasn't added anything extraordinary to the feature lineup in 10 years.

We chose adobe photoshop in 1993, instead of a used Pixar Image Computer. Back then this stuff was ground breaking. We had a quadra 950 with 64 megs of memory (the memory alone was $5000). The license for photoshop was $500.

18 years later, computing power is cheap.

and Adobe has been playing safety defense for 10 years. The signs are all there. Buying up all sorts of smaller companies or competitors. Innovation is dead. Lot's of top down decisions. Microsoft, Autodesk, and Adobe...are all just the big fat slugs of their domain. They need to be taken out and shot.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[baadger]

x86_64 is more of a cleanup to the aging x86 ISA. Not only does it future proof the architecture against big memory requirements but it also does away with ancient segmented addresses, provides more CPU registers (leading the the possibility of more specialized register operations, I assume) and generally allows people to break ABI *as a matter of course* which is great because on AMD64 arch's you can *assume* the presence of MMX, SSE, and SSE2 instruction sets. Even Microsoft, anally retentive back-compat evangelists, took the opportunity in Windows XP x64 and Windows 2003 x64 Server to introduce further kernel mode memory protections ('PatchGuard')

No x86 software, *including drivers*, should be shipping in both 64bit and 32bit binary form, all of the problems you mention with 64bit are essentially proprietary software exclusive btw, and just highlight the highly broken software ecosystem Microsoft Windows has fostered.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Hal_Porter]

They should be concerned that Adobe got told that the API they relied on won't be ported to 64 bit though. That might affect other third party software vendors.

On Win32 the API doesn't really change when you go to 64 bit. And the LLP model means int and long stay 32 bit, only the pointers change size. So code that reads bitmaps for example won't break. Now you can argue about this, but it means if you've spent ages developing Win32 code it only takes a few days to port a large application to Win64.

Now Windows has ~90% of the market place and Apple has ~6%. If you were Adobe and getting to 64 bit on Apple required a lot more work in return access to far less of the market place, wouldn't you be tempted to tell people to use Bootcamp if they want to use the 64 bit version? Now I know Adobe will do the work at least this time, but don't you think decisions like this may cause other vendors to reconsider keeping their Mac ports going?

I know Adobe had a hard time going from PPC to Intel

http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/03/macintosh_and_t.html

The thing that Apple needs to realise is that independent software vendors are an asset to the platform. If you keep making them to extra unnecessary work - the transition from Metroworks to XCode and from Carbon to Cocoa - to support a minority platform when the majority platform doesn't require this, then they might well just tell people to use Bootcamp. Which they do already for Framemaker.

http://www.macworld.com/article/50465/2006/04/photoshop.html

"However there are some products that we have today that we have not been able to afford to continue to develop to make available on the Mac. A great example being FrameMaker. The majority of FrameMaker users use Windows as an OS but there is a small percentage that want to use FrameMaker on the Mac so they can use Boot Camp."
Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen Actually maybe Bootcamp is too much hassle for most people. But I've seen Parallels desktop, and it's really slick. Sooner or later someone will work out a way to get Windows applications running seamlessly on Intel Mac, if they haven't already.

So the hassle for Mac users running a Windows application is dropping all the time. And that will definitely affect Adobe's decisions whether to spend man power on refactoring every few months to keep tracking Job's whims. But in the long run, if the Mac has no native third party applications, it will go the way of OS/2.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[jocknerd]

Yep, Adobe was told that Cocoa was the future for OS X development. And yet, they chose to stick with Carbon. Can't blame Apple for that one. Simple fact is Photoshop is designed for Windows first and then ported. So its not a native Mac app and doesn't take advantage of all the technology in OS X. If you want to see what I'm talking about, take a look at Pixelmator. While its not on par with Photoshop, it combines the power of ImageMagick with the underlying technology from OS X.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[MidnightBrewer]

Photoshop's legacy is all Apple. If you've ever tried to use Photoshop in Windows from, say 4.0 on (about the time I tried using it on Windows, instead of my Mac, where I started at 2.5), you'd know how horribly awkward it was compared to its smooth operation on the Mac OS. Adobe has been criticized on the Windows side for having a Mac-like interface as well, which Windows users have been forced to just get used to.

Adobe has a long legacy of making sure their application is rock-solid and reliable before releasing. They, of any company, were the ones to set the bar for what it's like to release incredibly stable, bug-free software without any major point release dramas to fix glaring mistakes.

Yes, ever since they decided it was a good idea to put a salesman at the head of the company who believes that it's not what you sell, but how you sell it that's important, they've started going down a bad road. Their subsequent attempts to lock the system down with draconian DRM etc. has not improved their image much. However, there is no way to compare Pixelmator to Photoshop. Pixelmator can afford to be nimble because it has no expectations to live up to and is a relatively limited application with little utility in comparison.

Photoshop is a (reasonably) well-thought-out system of utilities and tools that have always done a darn good job working within the limits of the processor and memory and still manage to offer speedy, capable performance and a comprehensive 3rd-party plugin architecture. Adobe's main crutch is that they can't afford to simply throw away doing things the way they've always done in order to move forward; their own success has locked them into evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, progress.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Swift2001]

Adobe has a huge problem: its past. When the Mac crossed over to OS X, Photoshop had a huge constituency that wasn't going to be happy about running in Classic, and a huge code base that needed some heavy lifting to translate to Cocoa. Apple provided the Carbon template as a temporary transition to OS X. Adobe farted around and took the easy way out. Imagine, they just discovered that there would be no 64-bit Carbon. So they'd actually have to delve into all that spaghetti and rewrite stuff. Apple switches to Intel, and to 64-bit chips. It's seven years into OS X. It's not a fad. Wake up, Adobe!

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Lord Flipper]

I think of Lightroom as a reinvention of a lot of what Photoshop that I need to do...

My ex-wife was struggling with a demo of Photoshop, and had run into some serious lag and 'early-version' blues with Aperture. I gave her a full version of Lightroom, and racked up a ton of points, let me tell you.

I do work with already-existing images, for the most part, and use Photoshop and PhotoRetouch Pro. But she is a photographer (amongst other things) and absolutely loves Lightroom. I'd recommend it, based on my limited usage, and more on her real usage, to anyone out there who takes pictures and wants to pop them into their file systems with some serious editing on the way in. Really outstanding work on the part of Adobe... almost makes up for GoLive... on second thought, no... no, it doesn't. :)

Adobe Flash on PPC Linux?

[BladeMelbourne]

I guess there's no hope now...

Re:Adobe Flash on PPC Linux?

[Xtravar]

Aw cmon, porting isn't that hard! You just run "replace all" a few thousand times and then fix compile errors until it runs!

Then you hand it to your QAers. "Good luck, fuckers!"

blame Apple and/or Adobe?

[G3ckoG33k]

Sorry, but I will blame Microsoft.

It may be a knee-jerk reaction, but still. ;)

Blame Apple?

[DragonHawk]

Blame Apple? I didn't think we could do that, here.

The blame falls solely on Apple

[antifoidulus]

they promised, and then rescinded, 64 bit Carbon, and didn't even bother to tell developers until WWDC 2007. This is the big problem with Apple's secrecy, sometimes they are secret just to be secret. There was NO reason not to let developers know there would be no 64 bit carbon as soon as the decision was made, but Apple waited until the last possible second for who knows why.

Yeah, Carbon is dead and they should be going to all Cocoa, but that takes time, and if it was your intention to kill Carbon, why even promise a 64 bit version at all? Why not state from the getgo that you plan to phase out Carbon and that if you want a 64 bit GUI you better be making it in Cocoa? Apple goes out of their way to piss people off sometimes I swear.

Re:The blame falls solely on Apple

[Teese]

Apple have never promised 64-bit Carbon. They did promise 64bit carbon, during the 2006 WWDC. It wasn't until the 2007 WWDC that they rescinded the promise. Before the 2007 WWDC, they backed up the promise with seeds with 64bit carbon support in. They removed that 64bit carbon support in the 2007 WWDC seed. Of course they also slightly redefined what carbon meant. It now means the GUI portions of what used to be called carbon. So there are parts of "carbon" that are 64bit. They just aren't called carbon anymore.

Re:The blame falls solely on Apple

[LWATCDR]

There is a difference between being picking up a language and knowing the language. Yes a good C++ developer can start coding in Objective-C in a few days or maybe weeks. I would bet that it will take a few months before they are really comfortable with it. Then toss in Cocoa and you have a pretty steep learning curve. It will just make it harder to develop software for both Windows and Mac. There are few companies that will choose to drop the Windows market for the Mac market.
I would love to try Objective-C but the lack of bindings for GTK, QT, and Windows keeps me from putting in the effort.
It is a shame since I hear that Objective-C is better than C++ in many ways.

bad summary - there will be a 32-bit version

[Anonymous Coward]

You misread the article:

The Lightroom news naturally raises the question: What's Adobe doing with Photoshop? In the interest of giving customers guidance as early as possible, we have some news to share on this point: in addition to offering 32-bit-native versions for Mac OS X and 32-bit Windows, just as we do today, we plan to ship the next version of Photoshop as 64-bit-native for Windows 64-bit OSes only.

Re:bad summary - there will be a 32-bit version

[langelgjm]

You misread the summary (so did I, at first). It's not "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be For 64-Bit Windows Only," it's "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be 64-Bit For Windows Only."

Re:I vote Apple

[gEvil (beta)]

Didn't Apple say nearly 10 years ago that Carbon was a stopgap solution and that you shouldn't particularly rely on it anyways?

But AMD64 could be...

[mrchaotica]

Remember, going to 64-bit on x86 can make programs faster, but not because of the extra bits. The speedup comes from the fact that, in addition to increasing the bits, AMD also added a bunch of extra registers to the spec.

Re:But AMD64 could be...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The additional GPRs and XMM registers are not vendor-specific, as they are a natural part of the AMD64/EM64T platform, and Intel has adopted them as well, as they are a required part of the specification. These registers may speed up tight inner loops by allowing to keep more data a hand. Yes, I know that this is not going to help many applications, for example data structures with a large percentage of pointers/references (trees and graphs, for instance) might actually get slower on 64 bits due to the size increase and memory "speed" (unless you are using something like DataDraw), but expensive computations on packed homogeneous data can get much faster under right circumstances.

If you can generate tight inner code from a node tree, for example, even if the expression trees you can compile are very simple, things can get much faster, because less accesses even to cache equals more speed. You basically cannot saturate a modern PC CPU's execution units from memory today - if you're not running from registers and have to hit the memory to reach the big picture (pun intended :)) in order to just multiply and add some pixel values from several layers, you might be losing an order of magnitude of performance compared to the theoretical limit. If the operations are more complex, and you have dozens of layers and you are adding them and multiplying them and processing them all over the place, it is faster to keep the intermediate the values in registers even at the cost of having to generate some code. The other option is to spill the values into intermediate buffers and that is not a good thing for performance.

I do not think that the people at Adobe are dumb. VirtualDub uses this idea, and I think I read something about the Windows GUI kernel using such techniques as well. I fail to see why the leader in the market of graphics editors would avoid such opportunity.

Re:I vote Apple

[falcon5768]

Wasnt sudden at all, the writing was on the wall when Apple released OS X. Carbon was supposed to be a quick way to transition your OS9 programs to OSX. That was it. Adobe had no issues writing new programs in Cocoa (Lightroom) but continued to drag its feet on a port for the 64bit version of its landmark products, content to add GUI bullshit that many are not even sure was a improvement.

This was as sudden as Apple dropping OS9 development. It was coming and coming for years, but developers are more content to repackage old code, than to rewrite it. This is the same mentality thats screwing Vista development too. Developers are just plain LAZY.

Let the blame game begin!

[MrMacman2u]

Personally, I'm taking Adobe to task on this one.

Carbon was initially meant to be a "type" of backward compatibility with old Mac OS "less than X" applications so that they would require minimal re-writes of code to allow the program to be Mac OS X "native".

Apple has been pushing people to use the "more native superior" Cocoa framework for a number of years now by not only urging programmers and developers to use Cocoa but, by also enhancing the speed, stability and capabilities of Cocoa while Carbon stagnated (comparatively) and Adobe has constantly and stubbornly refusing to re-write ANYTHING they make to use the superior Cocoa framework.

This has been the case since the "Photoshop 7 ver.2" generation of Adobe's Mac products.

Lightroom uses Cocoa because it was made from scratch. That's it. If it was a hold over from pre-X days, I would bet my geek creds that it would be written in carbon.

Yes, I do fully realize that re-coding all of Adobe's Creative Suite to the Cocoa framework is a monstrous task, but Adobe has been severely dragging their feet regarding the switch-over which, I might add, they "hoped for in CS2 and "promised" for CS3!

That totally happened..... oh wait, it didn't! So now Adobe is caught with their pants down and doesn't want to admit it, despite Apple saying "You're not supposed to use Carbon anymore!" for years.

So no, this is not Apple's fault. It's Adobe's and I look forward to seeing any counter-arguments!

This should be interesting!

Re:Let the blame game begin!

[Tridus]

So no, this is not Apple's fault. It's Adobe's and I look forward to seeing any counter-arguments! TFA said that Apple promised Carbon would get 64 bit support in 2006, then changed their minds and cancelled it in 2007.

If Adobe expects Carbon to get 64 bit support (because Apple said so) and then it suddenly doesn't, its pretty easy to see how that is going to screw things up. That part is Apple's fault.

So since their Carbon version isn't going to ever be 64 bit, they need to do a Cocoa port to get there. Thats only necessary because of Apple's cancellation of 64 bit Carbon, so its Apple's fault.

(Though I tend to agree with TFA that Apple's decision to do that was right, in the long term.)

Re:Let the blame game begin!

[MrMacman2u]

You act as if planned and/or announced features/products have never been canceled or abandoned and Apple is the only one to ever do this. *COUGH!*M$VISTA*COUGH!**COUGH!*

They decided to cancel 64 bit support for carbon and announced it. It's not like they simply decided to ship the next update/version of Carbon as 32 bit only and never told anyone.

Adobe's fair warning came 10 years ago. Carbon has always been a stop-gap. IMHO, no amount of blame directed anywhere but straight at Adobe should be cast.

Re:What will happen?

[john82]

As a matter of fact, Slashdot once again misleads with the choice of headline and half-the-story lead-in. Just a bit of reading reveals:

On the other hand, we work very hard at maintaining parity across platforms, and it's a drag that the Mac x64 revision will take longer to deliver. We will get there, but not in CS4. (Our goal is to ship a 64-bit Mac version with Photoshop CS5, but we'll be better able to assess that goal as we get farther along in the development process.) Hmmm. Not the end of the world after all.

hey

[Neuropol]

who cares.

GIMP runs well on macs with xcode & developer tools installed.

Adobe's foot-dragging? Most users won't care.

[argent]

I've been using 64-bit systems since 1994... including ILP64 Alpha processors... and unless you're memory starved 64-bit software tends to be slower than 32-bit software... with one exception: there's a serious problem with 32 bit mode that the 64-bit mode doesn't have.

On the Alpha, the problem was that 32-bit mode requires trapping many accesses because the CPU is *purely* 64-bit.

With AMD64, AMD implemented a large register file efficiently, so a good compiler can generate better code for it. Intel's implementation of AMD64 doesn't seem to be as good, and since Apple is on Intel...

Also, Adobe has to have a 64 bit version for Windows, because Windows comes in 64- and 32- bit versions, but OS X has the same support for both 64- and 32- bit in the same OS...

So unless you're editing truly enormous images, far larger than most users ever deal with, this doesn't matter.

On the plus side, Apple's been trying to kick Adobe into converting to NeXTSTep/Yellow Box/Cocoa since 1997, and Adobe's knuckle-dragging over abandoning Classic is what made Carbon necessary in the first place, so I don't think Adobe's in any position to say Apple didn't give them plenty of warning.

It's been 11 years and they're finally going "oh, man, I guess Apple's really serious about this Objective C stuff!".

Use QT, like the rest of the world

[SwiftX]

Trolltech(/ nokia) is working with Apple to get QT on MacOSX using Cocoa.
Problem solved!
SwiftX

Re:What will happen?

[Raffaello]

Exactly. Adobe, along with all Mac OS developers were warned almost a decade ago - essentially a previous geological epoch in computer terms - that going forward they would have to move their apps from Carbon, the old OS 9 compatibility layer - to Cocoa, the new Mac OS X framework which has been the fully native Mac OS X framework since the developer previews of Mac OS X in the late 90s.

Adobe was busy focusing on the windows market and betting that Apple would go out of business so they put 0 effort into porting Photoshop to Cocoa - OOOPS!

Apple not only survived but thrived, so Adobe simply dug in their heels and assumed that Apple would keep Carbon around forever rather than risk losing Adobe. Instead, Apple simply built internal Cocoa replacements for all the Carbon software whose absence could threaten the platform:

Microsoft Internet Explorer -> Safari
Microsoft Outlook -> Mail and AddressBook
Microsoft Word -> Pages
Microsoft Excel -> Numbers
Microsoft PowerPoint -> Keynote
Adobe Photoshop -> Aperture

This 64bit issue is no one's fault except Adobe who have had nearly a decade's warning that they needed to move from Carbon to Cocoa.

Re:LOL

[Raffaello]

You're clearly unfamiliar with the history. Apple have been saying that Carbon was a temporary transitional framework and that developers should move to Cocoa since the late 90s.

Dropping 64 bit support for Carbon *GUI* code (yes, there is 64 bit Carbon, just not 64 bit Carbon GUI libraries) was just the latest in Apple's long litany of warnings that Carbon is eventually going bye bye and developers should transition to Cocoa, something they were told to do nearly a decade ago.

Re:I vote Apple

[jcupitt65]

You're thinking of Tiger, I think. Leopard is fully 64-bit. http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/64bit.html

Re:What will happen?

[bhima]

Just want to correct one thing: Aperture is not a replacement for photoshop it is a competitor of Adobe Lightroom. Apple doesn't have a direct replacement for photoshop.

Adobe had no other choice

[courtarro]

When it comes to software development, companies prefer to make changes that affect the customer directly, and in the short term. The Ars article mentions that it would take a serious redistribution of resources to begin the port from Carbon to Cocoa, which means that feature development and stability improvements (things that the customer sees) would have slowed significantly. CS4 might come out with a few new features, but users would complain that it is basically a rehash of CS3 and there would be significant negative press. Arguments would intensify that Photoshop has hit a plateau, and future sales would be hurt.

All that would be the result of the forward-looking decision to port to Cocoa far before this point, and that decision would have had the potential to cause more problems for Adobe than they're seeing now by not having a Cocoa version ready. Today's news is bad press for Adobe, but it's not as bad as it could have been. In reality, people will get along with a 32-bit Mac version or the 64-bit Windows version instead. Since the problem of making a Cocoa port is now very customer-facing, the marketplace will likely be more forgiving of a feature stall over the next few years.

Um... Adobe just re-wrote CS3 from the ground up

[Toe, The]

Remember the enormous delay Adobe had in bringing CS3 to OS X? Their excuse for that was that they the Intel chipset was making them abandon their CodeWarrior-developed code and they had to start over from scratch.

So now they are saying that when they made the decision to start over from scratch, they chose the older, backward-compatible API instead of a forward-looking modern one? If their mumbling about the delay of CS3 were true, then there was no reason at all that they wouldn't have just moved to Cocoa right then.

Adobe needs to get their lies straight if they hope to be as awful of a company as Microsoft (something they seem to be striving for with increasing vigor).

Misleading title?

[penguin_dance]

When I read the title, "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be 64-Bit For Windows Only" it sounded like it will ONLY run on 64-bit computers with Windows. Which sounds crazy that they would limit their market to 64-bit Windows Vista. But after you read the article and comments, it will be able to run on 32-bit computers also. There are 32-Bit macs, aren't there? (I realize the 64-bit is especially useful in all things graphic that take up a lot of memory.)

Perhaps a better title would have been, "64-Bit Macs Snubbed by Photoshop CS4"

You are still wrong...

[hummassa]

Okay, stipulated. Regardless, it's the memory address space that allows for the speed improvement when working with large files, not new JMP routines. JMP routines? Actually, the extra register things is capable of optimizing out _many_, _many_ memory accesses... leaving the path clear for the SIMD instructions to fetch repeatedly only the data that your extended addressing is capable of. Imagine (simplifying a little) some transform being done to an image, that alters some data:

for( all pixels in the image ) { x1 = red(pixel); x2 = (x2 + x1 *2 + 3) % MAX; blue(pixel) = x2 }

if x1, x2 are put in registers then your transform will fetch only the pages where the pixel values are; if x2 is in memory, then _each_ fetch of a page where a pixel are is interleaved with one fetch and one write of the page where x2 is. This means that the operation becomes probably three to four times slower.

Re:You are still wrong...

[fitten]

To add to your post, the folks at Cinebench were very happy transitioning from 32-bit land to 64-bit land (x86-64) because they were able to get rid of a lot of cruft and make use of the registers and such to achieve a significant speedup with their 64-bit version over their 32-bit version.

Also, in 32-bit land, you can use blocking algorithms to get by memory limitations. Not all operations must be done over the entire file, requiring all the data be in memory at the same time so it isn't like 32-bit can't do what 64-bit can memory-wise.