April 16, 2010 – Monday April 12, 2010 was the big Adobe Creative Suite 5 launch event. In their online presentation, they gave us a brief look at some of the major updates we could look forward to in our favorite creative applications. Since we talk about photography here, I’m going to just highlight Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop CS5 Extended.
Photoshop is now a native 64-bit application on both Mac and Windows and contains a number of new features to aid in the creative process. More than 30 of the features added were requested directly by the Photoshop community including automatic image straightening, rule-of-thirds crop tool and the ability to save 16-bit JPEGs to name a few. Some features like Photoshop’s next-generation HDR, state-of-the-art raw image processing with amazing noise reduction, Refine Edge selection tool and automatic lens correction eliminate the need for a lot of third-party plug-ins.
Photoshop Extended is designed for video, web and interactive designers and contains all of the features in Photoshop CS5 plus tools for editing 3D and motion-based content. If you don’t do work in one of these areas it’s probably not necessary to get the Extended version, just stick with the standard version and save yourself some money.
Prior to the CS5 launch event, Adobe had a bunch of sneak peek videos online showing some of the new features in Photoshop. One that went viral with close to 2 million views showed the new Content Aware Fill feature. I’m really excited about this one. I’ve been using Photoshop since 1993 and have done a lot of masking, cloning and painting to remove objects from an image. With the Content Aware Fill, all you have to do is highlight the object to be removed, then Photoshop works its magic by examining the surrounding area and seamlessly fills in the space left behind matching the lighting, tone and noise perfectly. Just think how much faster it will be to remove those stray hairs, skin blemishes, or distracting objects in the background of your images.
With so many new and exciting features in Photoshop CS5, I can’t possibly cover them all here. So head over to Adobe’s website to get the details along with video demonstrations of the new features.
The CS5 applications will begin shipping mid May and can be purchased as a collection of apps or individually. The full edition of Photoshop CS5 will sell for $699 and $199 for the upgrade. The full version of Photoshop CS5 Extended will sell for $999 and $349 for the upgrade. There are also several cross platform and stand alone product upgrades available from Adobe’s website that could save you some money, so be sure to check out those options as well.
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Founder of Current Photographer, co-host of The Digital Photography Cafe Show, Designer, Photographer, and overall tech geek.