A look at Photoshop CS6

If you follow Photoshop development news, you may have noticed that over the past few weeks they’ve been releasing sneak peek videos on their YouTube account for Photoshop CS6. The newest version of Photoshop, slated for release later this year, is going to include some really spectacular new features, including a slightly redesigned default interface. Each video released has given us a look at a different new feature, presented by the project development team. Considering that a majority of designers out there use Photoshop, we decided to take a closer look at the features they’ve discussed so far.

Sneak peek #1

Photographers will be impressed with the new Camera Raw feature in CS6, especially cell phone photographers. Camera Raw gives you a huge number of tools you can use for adjusting the look of your photos, including the ability to adjust highlights and shadows, sharpen images and bring out details, and much more. What this means is that all those candid cell phone shots you took (or any inferior images, really) can be retouched to look significantly better, and more in line with photos taken from professional-level gear. While it’s not a miracle-worker, you might think it is after seeing what it can do. Check it out:

Sneak peek #2

The second sneak peek shows us some significant performance improvements. First of all, they’ve finally added background save. You can click save one file and work on another while the first saves in the background. This is particularly useful for those who work on very large files that can take more than a few seconds to save. The other significant performance improvement was shown with the liquify filter. While older versions of Photoshop showed very apparent lag in both displaying the original image and in showing a preview of the applied effect. CS6 is instant with both. While they only showed it with the liquify effect, I’m betting this performance improvement is apparent with all of the filters and effects Photoshop offers.

Sneak peek #3

One really frustrating thing that has been lacking from previous versions of Photoshop is the inability to easily create dashed and dotted lines. CS6 makes it easy, by adding both as default settings for lines (including on a stroke layer style). While this seems like a rather elementary change, it’s one that I’m sure will be greatly appreciated by a lot of designers!

Sneak peek #4

How many times have you had a client ask you to just move someone in a photo? They say it like it’s the easiest thing in the world, like all you have to do is point and click a couple times and it’s done. Content-Aware technology finally makes that perceived simplicity a reality. The two demos shown in this video really show just how powerful this new technology is. Everything from repositioning elements within the frame to extending geometric shapes is shown.

Sneak peek #5

One of the most annoying bits of upgrading to any new technology is migrating all of your old user settings and presets to the new version. CS6 will include new tools to do that for you, saving you tons of time and manual work. They’re also adding dozens of JDI (“just do it”) features from user requests. These include all sorts of long-awaited items, like more layer features and the return of PDF Presentation and Contact Sheet. While Photoshop CS6 won’t be out for a few more months, it’s sure to be an exciting new release. You can subscribe to the official Photoshop YouTube channel for more updates. Today Photoshop Touch for iPad was also released, check it out