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At Photokina, Adobe introduced Photoshop CS4 as part of its upgraded Adobe Creative Suite 4 family of products for all types of creative workflows. The software is expected to be available October 15.

New features in Photoshop CS4 include:

Content-Aware Scaling that automatically recomposes an image as you resize it.

A Canvas Rotation tool that enables you to rotate and work on an image from any angle.

Smoother panning and zooming tools that maintain image clarity even while you’re editing images at the highest magnification.

An Adjustment Panel that enables you to select all of your corrections and adjustments from a single panel.

A Masks Panel that enables you to quickly create and edit masks.

Auto-align and Auto-blend modes that generate composites based on extended depth-of-field and 360-degree panoramas with seamless tones and colors.

Enhancements include:

More powerful printing options, including tighter integration with leading printer models, the ability to preview out-of-gamut image areas, and support for 16-bit printing on Mac OS.

The ability to select multiple photos in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and automatically open them in Photoshop CS4 to merge them into a panorama, a high-dynamic-range image, or a multi-layered Photoshop document.

Re-engineered Dodge, Burn and Sponge tools that intelligently preserve color and tone details.

Better RAW image processing, including support for localized corrections, post-crop vignetting, and more than 190 camera models.

You can see quick demos of all of the new and enhanced features at the Adobe Photoshop CS4 Feature Web page.Or, you can visit the websites of Lynda.com, O’Reilly Media, NAPP, and other training companies and book publishers who expect Adobe Creative Suite 4 to bring them an influx of new customers. Many of these organizations have already posted free previews and reviews of the new and enhanced features in Photoshop CS4.

Lynda.com has launched a CS4 University with over 100 hours of instructional videos on all facets of Adobe Creative Suite 4. In the New Features section on Photoshop CS4, Deke McClelland presents a short video on one of the most intriguing new features, Content Aware Scaling. What makes this preview valuable is that McClelland calls attention to some of the limitations of the Content Aware Scaling on certain types of images.

O’Reilly Media, which will be releasing Deke McClelland’s book Adobe Photoshop CS4 One-on-One in October, is promoting McClelland’s 5-minute DekePod entitled Photoshop CS4: Buy or Die. In this Deke Pod video, McClelland reviews the practical value of some the most significant features in Photoshop CS4

O’Reilly Media will also be releasing The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers by professional photographer Derrick Story. This book is written specifically for digital photographers and is portable enough to carry in a laptop bag. Story describes how to use Photoshop CS4, Adobe Bridge, and Photoshop Camera Raw to quickly and efficiently organize and edit photos without compromising the originals.

NAPP (the National Association of Photoshop Professionals) has introduced the Adobe Photoshop CS4 Learning Center with 17 video tutorials that highlight new and enhanced features. The Learning Center also includes a downloadable PDF of article entitled the “Top Ten New Features in Photoshop CS4” and a videotaped interview with John Nack, senior product manager for Adobe Photoshop.

If you’re not yet a NAPP member, you can freely access the Learning Center for a limited period of time. Later, only NAPP members will be able to use the Photoshop CS4 Learning Center.