At first i thought i will not write about this because there is already zillions of websites which are talking sense and giving a detailed explanation of new features of Photoshop Creative Suite CS6, comparison with CS5, what is suited for whom etc since yesterday morning. But considering that i have already downloaded and giving it a test spin, i thought i will just point you to a small list of features and UI changes which i definitely thought would be helpful for photographer point of view. From what i have seen till now, the improvements in CS6 gonna be welcomed by graphic artists and simillar much better than a travel/nature photographer like me. But the performance improvements does deserve a huge round of applause from my end. Below is a list of noticeable changes that i found helpful and worthwhile of of mention here.
The UI change is one of the most noticeable thing in the Photoshop CS6, the way in which the pannels are laid out on the right hand side also has underwent a change.
If you were bored about the old light gray background of the earlier version of Photoshop, the new CS6 will allow you to select 4 different varriations of gray ranging from the lightest ( the older one ) to the darkest gray.
Photoshop CS6 now supports doing basic edits in Video editing on a new Timeline feature and this is a worthwhile new feature considering that most of the photographers are now jumping into the HD-DSLR bandwagon.
The preference menu in the Photoshop CS6 now shows an additional new resizing algorithm called “Bicubic Algorithm” – am yet to get to know what exactly it does and when and where it finds more apt, but will explore more about it in coming days.
The most remarkable change in Photoshop CS6 is the “Background save” which can be activated in the preferences menu. This enables you to continue to work on your files whilst the images are undergoing save operation in background.
My most favorite change so far has been the changes to the Crop tool which had not seen any updates since ages. The crop tool now allows you to retain the cropped portion of the image in the master image, which enables you to go back at a later date if you want to do minor tweaks to the image. There is also a view option which enables you to select different overlay option. I am a huge fan of creative compositional crops and the overlay option gets a 5* from my end as it definitely makes my life more easy 🙂
A lot has been said and has been expressed about the “Content aware move tool”, am yet to explore this option too since the time i downloaded. But from a nature photographers perspective am not too supportive of this feature – i know its debatable and each one will have his/her own say about this but i would refrain from speaking further because of the negative use of such tools by nature photographers to make their images more “technically perfect or beautiful”.
Anyways thats it for now, hope you all go ahead and download the beta version and have fun exploring the new tool in the market. Having said that, you can never make a imperfect image out of a camera to a perfect masterpiece using this tool – so better get your basics right and try and get good images from the field.
Photoshop CS6 Beta download at Adobe Labs
One of my favorite resource on the web for learning > NAPP has come up with a Photoshop CS6 microsite where you can learn a lot about the new features and much more >Â http://www.photoshopuser.com/cs6