Everyone knows that if you take photos; you use photoshop. There are competitors, alternatives, but none of them can quite top the behemoth that is Photoshop. Fortunatly, Adobe are not like a lot of developers who slack off when their software has a monopoly on the market; CS4 has brought many new features to both the professional and the hobbyist.

First, the new interface. I'm not normally a fan of programs that deviate from the standard windows UI but the new Photoshop setup just works. It's smooth, slick, and easy to use; going back to CS3 feels like jumping back to Windows 98; it works but it's just not quite as functional.

Then there's the graphics card acceleration; most tasks can now take advantage of your graphics card to boost the speed, and in some cases the gain is remarkable, knocking seconds off long edits on big photos.

Many features are now "content aware", including cropping, so it will automatically crop out areas that are not part of the focus, without manually selecting them.

There's many, many more, but there's nowhere near enough time to explain them all... check out this list if you are interested in a few more, and make sure you upgrade!