That’s right folks, we’re already talking about the next installment of Adobe’s flagship image editor. Although the real juicy details are being kept tightly under wraps (thanks to Adobe’s NDA policies), we do now have some early news on what the next version of Photoshop will include.

You may remember that earlier this week Adobe was a part of the Photoshop World Conference keynote. During the keynote John Loiacona (Adobe’s Senior VP of the Creative Solutions Business Unit), gave a quick demonstration of some of the new features of CS4. The first feature he demonstrated was a non-destructive (highly-enhanced) dodge and burn tool. He stated that Adobe is looking to revamp the tools that imaging professionals use everyday and attempting to make them better and non-destructive to the underlying image.

The second (and final) feature shown by “Johny L” was the “True Edge” function which will be incorporated into the Refine Edge feature of Photoshop. True Edge basically helps to enhance the edges of your selection, keeping them true to the actual edge of the object you’re selecting and ensuring a more defined line between subject and background. Not much else was said about these features, but nonetheless it was a nice teaser for everyone.

In a recent blog post, Photoshop Product Manager John Nack spilled some more beans about the upcoming Adobe Application. On his blog John stated that the next version of Photoshop would be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions for Windows users, but Mac users would have to settle for a 32-bit version of CS4. So why do Mac users have to suffer? Well, John explained that too…

“At the WWDC show last June, however, Adobe & other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa (as Lightroom is) instead of Carbon. This means that we’ll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa.”

It appears the Mac community can blame Apple for this trade-off… Sorry fan-boys! Either way, CS4 will undoubtedly be amazing and take image editing to yet another level. Unfortunately that’s all of the official news we have for now, but we can expect more as we get closer to the actual release date of the program.

Update:

Here is the video of the CS4 Sneak Peek that Adobe gave at the Photoshop World Keynote. This video appears courtesy of Rod Harlan’s Blog “DV Confidential“