Digital Trends

Adobe Photoshop CS4 will take advantage of 64-bit processors, but technical problems will keep that capability from being realized on OS X.

Sorry Mac guys: OS X may be the operating system of choice for image editing professionals, but when the next version of Adobe Photoshop rolls out, it’s Windows users who will have the edge in performance. On Wednesday, Adobe leaked the first details about Photoshop CS4, revealing that that it will support 64-bit processing, but only on Windows machines.

Photoshop product manager John Nack explained in his blog that the decision to release Photoshop x64 on one platform and not the other was driven by practical problems. The development team had been working on both versions side by side, but Apple’s decision to change the way 64-bit applications would need to be programmed for OS X forced the Adobe team to restart from scratch late in the game.

While Nack makes it apparent that there’s no bad blood between the companies, OS X users will miss the first x64 version of Photoshop, which should deliver a performance boost of around 8 to 12 percent under normal conditions. The true advantage of 64-bit processing – access to over 4GB of RAM – will probably not be tapped by most users for some time. For instance, Nack claims 64-bit processing has the potential to speed up the program by 10 times, but only for users working with very large files (as in 3.75 gigapixels) on very capable machines (as in 32GB of RAM).

As for other CS4 news, Adobe has kept mum on other new features, and no release date has yet been announced.