Adobe Photoshop CS6 Product Overview

Adobe Photoshop CS6 public beta now available to download from Adobe. We had an early look at the latest version of Adobe Photoshop CS6 and give an overview of the latest features introduced.



According to Adobe there are now 62% new features in Adobe Photoshop CS6, with over 65 user inspired enhancements, as well as a completely new Adobe Mercury graphics engine.



Adobe Photoshop CS6 is now a much more feature rich application with vector support from Illustrator, and video support from Premier built into the standard version of CS6. The CS6 Extended version now includes enhanced 3D support, as well as a faster ray trace engine.


Camera RAW 7 Improvements (from Lightroom 4 engine):

• Highlights
• Shadows
• Clarity engine with no halos even at 100%
• Graduated filter
• Adjustment brush can paint on temperature / adjustments to specific areas

Additional features:

• Mini Bridge - Film strip shown at bottom of workspace
• Auto Save feature (Uses GPU in background) and allows you to continue working on images, auto recovery also built in
• Bicubic resizing - best for reduction / larger / now "auto" available in case you don't know which options would be best
• Brush size now up to 15,000 - was 1500 in CS5
• 4 colour themes available: black, dark grey, grey, light grey (classic)

Improvements made to Layers:

• Search / Filter layer list
• Duplicate multiple layers
• Change opacity / blending across multiple / grouped layers

Lots of work done on AUTO controls:



Now content aware: Levels / Curves / Contrast / Brightness


New Blur Gallery features:

• Field Blur
• Iris blur
• Tilt-shift / miniature / diorama - with Bokeh control (light / colour saturation)

Adaptive wide-angle tools:

• Panoramic
• Fish-eye
• Correction

You are then able to use content aware fill to fill in the gaps after correction.


Content aware patch tool (new) - select area to base content aware fill on.
Content aware move tool / extend tool, as shown above.

New crop tool (From Lightroom) - can be used in old way too

• Non-destructive crop
• Rule of thirds / golden ratio
• Crop then straighten - it will re-use the full image

New Airbrush - erodible tips (Graphics tablet)

• Record brush strokes
• Watch it back (see slide photo)

Full Vector support (from illustrator)
Skin aware / detect faces selection tool



Video now included in CS6 Standard - with a proper timeline, video works the same way as images with layers (see assets slide above), you can see in real-time what's happening to the clip.



Adobe Online Serial Number management - benefits if you lose your serial - offline contingency available - 7 day offline use available.



System requirements: The system requirements are quite reasonable and with the software using the GPU to enhance performance, it is said that upgrading the graphics card in a PC can dramatically improve the performance of Photoshop.