New photoshop Cs5

Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended

 

Photoshop turned twenty years old this year. That may seem like nothin' but a number, but when you look at the Mac platforms it's migrated to and from, and the fact that it's had 12 versions, Photoshop's twenty years have seen a lot of changes for one application. From System 6 on the Motorola 68000, it was then ported to PowerPC, then to OS X, then to OS X Intel, and now to Cocoa and 64-bit. All this while adding the features that make it the meaty image editor it is today. One look at the laundry list of major additions in CS5 makes it clear that Adobe isn't anywhere near done with the product. The new feature list is unrelenting:

• Wet media brushes
• Content-aware fill and heal tools
• Improved masking/chroma keying
• Camera RAW 6
• Puppet Warp
• Mini Bridge
• Data-based lens distortion correction with custom lens profiling application
• Local adaptation tone-mapping
• Faster realtime 3D engine
• Repoussé 3D features and HDR image-based lighting
• New floating color picker and eyedropper

Of course, all of these features also appear in the Windows version, which has had 32- and 64-bit flavors since version CS4. Let's not forget that Windows 7 just came out as well, so Adobe's had its work cut out for it with this latest installment. I've been working with the betas and the release for a while now, so let's see how it all worked out.

Test Hardware

• Mac Pro dual quad-core Nehalem Xeon 2.66 GHz
  • 24GB RAM
  • 120GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD system drive with separate HD RAID scratch disk
  • Geforce GTX 285 / Radeon 4870 test scenarios
  • Dual NEC WUXi 2490 Spectraview monitors
  • OS X 10.6.3 running 64-bit kernel

• MacBook Pro Core2 Duo 2.4GHz 15" Santa Rosa
  • 4GB RAM
  • 120GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD
  • NVIDIA Geforce 8600M 256MB
  • OS X 10.6.3 running 32-bit kernel

System Requirements

Windows
• Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor
• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 3; Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (Service Pack 2 recommended); or Windows 7
• 1GB of RAM
• 1GB of available hard-disk space
• 1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM
• DVD-ROM drive
• QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for multimedia features
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services

Mac OS
• Multicore Intel processor
• Mac OS X v10.5.7 or v10.6
• 1GB of RAM
• 2GB of available hard-disk space for installation
• OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM
• DVD-ROM drive
• QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for multimedia features
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services*

Updated Tools and Adjustments

As I mentioned above, CS5 is loaded with new features, but there are some significant tweaks to the existing toolset to cover first. One small thing that a lot of people will appreciate is that you can now drag and drop smart objects into images directly. It's a handy little addition, especially if you are working between Illustrator and Photoshop, where you want to keep vector images as smart objects.

Hue Strip and Sampling Ring

With the new painting tools in CS5 came the need for quicker, interactive color adjustments and a better color sampler. The first of these additions is the Sampling Ring that's been added to the eyedropper. When you click a color with the eyedropper tool, a circular thing pops up that looks a bit like the manual focus ring on a camera:

The top half on the inside is your clicked sample and the bottom half is the active color before sampling. The grey ring on the outside is a neutral gray strip to show against your color. Some people might find the ring intrusive (it's pretty big), but it's definitely an upgrade over the Toolbox swatch, which looks anemic in comparison. This also lets you work on a fullscreen document with everything hidden.
In a similar "don't make me use a dialog for something essential" vein, the new Hue Strip is a pop-up color picker that complements the new painting features well. Control-option-command click in your image and you'll get a quick pop-up interface for selecting color:

Just looking at it pretty much explains its usage: slide to change the hue at the right, and pick a tint/shade in the block to the left. It's pretty bare bones, but it gets the job done nicely.

Interactive brush improvements.

Another small but significant change to the brushes in CS5 is the improved control-alt brush popup. This GPU-accelerated brush tip preview was added in CS4, and CS5 adds the ability to change brush softness as well as size. While holding control-alt, drag up/down for softness and left/right for size:

If you drag at a perfect 45-degree angle, nothing will happen to the brush shape, but your head could explode from the confusion of watching your cursor do nothing while the mouse moves. So be careful with that.

Advanced brushes
In the brush section is a Mixer brush tool. This is starting to take Photoshop further in a paint direction, but only small scale as the option has limited use. You can adjust the percentage of wetness, load, mix of colour and flow before you paint over the image using the foreground colour. To get you started there are a selection of presets from the drop down menu. As well as shape you can now set the Bristle Tip type and have a live preview, making it far more convincing as a paint brush...much like how Corel's Painter works.



Here a brush with red paint was set to Wet: 100%, Load 50%, Mix 24% and Flow 31%. You can see I'm not an artists but in the right hands this could be a powerful addition, although it's still way off Painter.

Lens Correction Filter > Lens Correction
A useful addition for photographers is the Lens Correction filter. Here you can correct lens problems such as Chromatic Aberrations, but create profiles for your lenses and adjust for barrel and pincushion distortion. By shooting a test chart and then reading this through the free Lens Profile utility you can set CS5 up to automatically rectify problems with your photos taken with that lens. Below is a screenshot showing the interface and fringing caused by a lens' Chromatic Aberration.


Watermarking Window > Extensions >Watermark
As copyright theft continues to be a serious threat  more photographers have started to add copyright messages across their photos. CS5 has just made the process much easier. With this palette you can set text message font size, family and colour along with position and opacity with ease. It can spoil looking at photos on the Internet, but it's the way many photographers are going.


 

Changes to Tools
You'll find a few new tool options 
On all the brushes there's now new icon on the top menu options - a tablet pressure control size that overrides brush settings and tunes in with your graphics tablet. The tablet pressure brush appears on any tool that has brush characteristics and can be controlled with a graphics tablet. Some brushes also have a tablet pressure control for opacity too.

Another icon takes you directly to the brush editing palette too, making the whole job a lot more seamless.

Clone tool
This old favourite has no new tricks apart from a toggle to go directly to the brush edit window and the clone source window so it's fast become the poor man's healing tool. In the clone source window you can now set a frame offset.