LITTLE ROCK — Mention photo editing, graphic design or website design, and likely you’ll hear the word Adobe pop up.
Adobe Systems has long set the industry standard in these areas with Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver. For the past few years, these programs have been bundled as part of Adobe’s Creative Suite series. Adobe recently released the latest Creative Suite series, CS6, which includes bundles for Design Standard, Design & Web Premium, Production Premium and the Master Collection.
My plan was to touch on a couple of the many programs Adobe has created or updated in CS6. Instead, I’m just going to talk about the flagship,Adobe Photoshop. It’s more of a revamp than an upgrade, and it’s loaded with new features that make everything so much easier.
The first change you notice is that the interface is completely different. Instead of light gray backgrounds, the toolbar, palettes and workspace are all dark gray. The toolbar is a single line of smaller icons, and the palettes slide in and out of a bar on the right. The result is a lot more real estate in which to work. The darker gray makes the image stand out more, so it’s easier to edit. Photographers may recognize this change - it looks a lot like the photo oriented Adobe Lightroom. (For those wanting to see the change, I’ve posted photos on the “Tech Spotlight” Facebook page.)
The new Adjustments palette is a wonderful addition to Photoshop. As a photographer, I’ve been taught to create “adjustment layers” so the underlying image isn’t altered. I always forget. The new Photoshop takes care of it for me. When I click on an Adjustment palette icon, Photoshop automatically creates an adjustment layer. The beauty of this is that if I finish the photo and decide that I don’t want the contrast or saturation adjustment I made at the beginning, I can click on it and trash it without losing other adjustments. I also can click on each adjustment layer and tweak it, even with other layers on top of it. It makes work flow so much easier.
Perhaps the biggest tool overhaul is the Crop tool. Instead of just drawing a box and hitting enter, you now have corner brackets for adjustments, a curved cursor to rotate the crop, new presets to create a variety of sizes and the ability to delete the excess or just hide it, so you can redo the crop later. It’s much more powerful, though it will take a bit of practice to use. If you don’t like it, though, there is a toggle switch to revert it to the old Crop tool. But it’s worth it to give the new one a try.
A lot of the tools and filters have been improved or redone. The Liquify tool, frankly, was a pain to use in the previous version because the preview was so slow. Adobe’s improved rendering engine makes the process a lot faster and more accurate. The new Color Sample tool makes it so much easier to pick certain colors from your document and use them elsewhere.
Another great new filter is the Adaptive Wide Angle filter. Wide-angle lenses tend to distort images, and while Photoshop’s Lens Correction filter helped with this in the past, the new filter provides even more power to correct this distortion or create more of it.
One of the new tools is the Tilt-Shift blur filter. I’ve secretly wanted one of those Lensbaby camera lenses that keep the center or certain areas in focus while blurring everything around it. I can achieve nearly the same result with the Tilt-Shift tool without having to buy an expensive lens. The filter is easy to use and allows you to place multiple points of focus, or a single strip of focus with the rest in blur. It’s just a fun special effect.
It’s time for the standard question, is it worth the upgrade? Ordinarily, I would say yes for much older versions, but you can get by on the most recent one. In this case, it’s worth the upgrade no matter what version you have.
The new Photoshop is a total overhaul. A better interface, better tools, new filters and faster special effects are just a few of the many reasons this upgrade is worth it for any Photoshop user.
Hopefully, I can peel myself away from it now to venture into other areas of Creative Suite 6. We’ll take a look at a couple of the bigger changes next week.
Melissa L. Jones can be reached via e-mail at mljones72@me.com.
Where it’s @
Adobe Photoshop requires Windows 7 or Windows XP (the latter with service pack 3, although some features still may not be available in XP); 1GB of memory and 1GB of hard drive space; or Mac OS 10.6.8 or 10.7; 1GB of memory and 2GB on the hard drive. An Internet connection is required for activation. The product retails for $199 for the upgrade or $699 for the full version. More information is available at www.adobe.com. For images from Photoshop CS6, visit the ‘Tech Spotlight” Facebook page at www.facebook.com/pages/Tech-Spotlight-column/143770982301273.
Business, Pages 23 on 05/28/2012