Introducing CS6
Adobe Creative Suite has become the premiere editing suite for web, photo and video. The compatibility between titles, and the logic of switching from one title to the next has been very attractive for designers and programmers alike. The flagship product in the Creative Suite is without question, Photoshop. When your product goes from being a proper noun to a verb, you know you’ve succeeded (i.e. “She’s not that hot, she looks Photoshopped”)
2012 marks a large leap forward for Adobe, and it has many people salivating about what possible changes may be happening with their favorite graphic image manipulator. I’ve compiled a list of upcoming changes that Adobe has dangled out there to keep us eager and taken a few screen caps of officially released Adobe videos so you can see for yourself some of the big changes ushered in to CS6. Let me tell you, not since spot healing and content aware erasing have I been this excited about an upcoming Adobe release!
Darker Interface
Now the background of the interface is darker to match Premiere and to make sure that what you work on is the highlight of what you are seeing. If you prefer the old look, that’s a click away. You can also change colors of canvas backdrop by context clicking.
Rich Cursor Support
If you make a change to the cursor, you see it on screen. No more guess and check as you modify your brush attributes!
Better Camera RAW Image Controls
They finally aligned the controls on the basic panel in Camera Raw mode. Modifying your image attributes used to be a challenge because you had no visual reference for the changes you made, dials were all over the place. Now you can see just how much you tweaked everything before you even open a RAW image in Photoshop. This is something that a lot of DSLR photographers have been wanting for a while!
They’ve also added a few new controls – adjust highlights and shadows right in Camera Raw mode. Adjusting clarity doesn’t introduce halos into your images any more. You can also use the adjustment brush to paint in effects like sharpen or warm tone, so effects don’t always have to affect your entire image any more.
Dotted Lines
Take that Corel Draw! Photoshop has finally added the ability to easily add a dash or dotted line, directly without any sort of funky tricks. This is something that PS users have been asking about for a very long time, and Adobe has heard you.
Migrate Your Settings
Adobe also added an option to migrate your settings from your current version to the new version of Photoshop. Once you customize your interface, you can export it to use it on other computers or in new versions of Photoshop.
This includes:
- presets
- work-spaces
- preferences
- settings
Just Do It Features
Adobe is really listening to it’s user base. They are bringing back contact sheet & PDF presentation modes in CS6. They brag about a whole library of JDIs (Just Do It) which are small feature requests from end users.
These include:
- Brush improvements
- New File Formats
- Improved Printing
- New ways to organize multiple layers at one time
Background Save & Liquify
In CS6 you can now perform a Background Save – don’t wait for a save to work on a new image! This won’t affect you for small projects, but for giant images and big batches this can save literally hours. Photo pros will be heard everywhere humming the hallelujah chorus.
Adobe has also addressed some known Liquify performance issues.
With the retooled CS6 you should see no more performance lags when you run the liquify tool. When loading a large image you should see no more tiling as the image loads nearly instantly.You can have a brush much bigger than 1500 pixels now, as cameras shoot larger and larger digital formats. You also have the option to re-size brushes with keyboard shortcuts (woohoo!)
Content Aware Changes
There are some very exciting changes happening to Content Aware which will reduce the need for complex selecting and masking. Now you can drive content aware erase with drag and drop, so if your selection is too close to the subject you won’t have to worry about Content Aware doing some weird awkward fill that is a blend of subject and background. One really exciting new feature is the ability to recompose a subject with no selections or masks with an all new content aware move tool! That means that you can do within one layer in just a few clicks what used to be a process involving multiple layers and a lot more effort! There is also a new content aware extend mode, so if you have something that trails and you want to make it go further you can do that without making several copies and trying to blend them together.
There is bound to be a lot more, so stay tuned for full coverage approaching release!