14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe announced the release of its latest and greatest Adobe Creative Suite 5 today. Adobe CS5 comes with 15 different tools aimed at various design or development tasks, but one of the best known and widely used programs in the suite is Adobe Photoshop. With Photoshop CS5, Adobe is bringing a number of new features and plenty of updates. There are a lot of things for the professional designer or photographer to get excited about, but for the pure awe factor nothing can replace Content-Aware Fill, which is nothing short of magic.
For photographers, there are a couple of tools that stand out. Fans of HDR photos, a trend that has become quite popular in recent years, should enjoy the new highly dynamic range features in Photoshop CS5, courtesy of its HDR Pro tool. It allows users to combine different photos taken at different exposures to create a supra-realistic effect and some rather interesting pictures, even though the effect may be a little over-used these days.
Photoshop CS5 also comes with an improved automatic lens correction tool. The tool focuses on three of the most common types of errors, geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. Finally, Photoshop CS5 gets the new Camera RAW 6 plugin, the same one featured in the upcoming Lightroom 3, which supports over 275 cameras. One of the biggest features in the new plugin is noise reduction, which has seen some dramatic improvements, helping clean up photos shot at even the highest ISO levels.
But things may be even more interesting for those focused on photo editing and manipulation. The star of the show is the Content-Aware Fill, which shows up in a number of touch-up tools. It uses advanced algorithms to fill areas that you may want to remove from an image. There have been plenty of tools to aid with this, but the process is now fully automated, accomplishing in a few seconds what would have taken a skilled Photoshop artist a few hours. You really have to see it to believe it, so you should check out the video below.
The selection tool has also seen some improvements and can now make even the most complicated selections easier. Complicated edges, even things like hair, can now be selected and isolated from the rest of the image with relative ease. Puppet Wrap is another tool new in Photoshop CS5, which enables users to shape or stretch various elements of an image without distortion. Adobe Photoshop CS5 is available as a standalone product, priced at $699, or $999 for Photoshop CS Extended. It is also available as part of several bundle collections.
