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Monday, July 8, 2013
ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS6
Photoshop CS6 makes full use of
your computer's Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), which provides tremendous
acceleration in many areas. So the Liquify filter, previously a sluggish
experience, is accelerated to provide smooth, real-time smearing even with brushes
up to the new maximum limit of 15,000 pixels; the new Oil Paint feature adds a
paint-like texture, with controls that operate on the full-screen preview in
real time. Of course, all this depends on you having a fast enough processor
and graphics card; although CS6 will run on Windows XP/Mac OS X 10.6 with just
1Gb RAM, you do need a hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card to get the
most out of it.
The new features
The first
thing you notice about Photoshop CS6 is its new interface. You now have the
choice between four base colours, from near-black to pale grey - so Photoshop
can look more like Lightroom if you choose. Everything has been subtly tweaked,
from the hundreds of redesigned icons (the Pen and Lasso tools now indicate
their active hotspots more clearly) to a crisper, more consistent layout.
New HUD with key info
A new Head
Up Display system (HUD) in Photoshop CS6 provides key information right at the
cursor. This is context sensitive, so will show dimensions when dragging out a
marquee, angles when rotating a selection, and so on. It also applies to the
three new Blur filters, each of which provides a different type of blur -
Field, Iris and Tilt Shift - with strength and radius controls directly on the
image, rather than just in a side panel. All three new filters are also GPU
accelerated for real-time previews.
Photoshop CS6 filters
There's
just one new tool in Photoshop CS6, the Content-Aware Patch tool, which takes
the technology introduced in CS4 (Content-Aware Scaling) and CS5 (Content-Aware
Fill) and extends it to a tool that allows us to select and move or extend
objects in a scene, patching their original location more or less seamlessly.
In practice, the results depend very much on having the right image; it's a
great idea, but doesn't always come up with the goods.
A major new filter is Adaptive
Wide Angle, which allows you to correct camera distortion simply by drawing
over lines that should be straight. A hugely powerful tool, it allows even
stitched panoramas with multiple perspectives to be corrected into a single
landscape shot.
Enhanced Camera Raw
Also good
for photographers is the enhanced Camera Raw dialog, which now has more
powerful versions of tools such as Clarity (there's now no halo effect, even at
maximum strength) and Defringing (the controls are gone, replaced by a single
checkbox which just does the job). For the first time in Photoshop CS6, it's
also possible to apply localised noise reduction.
Lighting Effects filter in
Photoshop CS6
The
Lighting Effects filter has had a major overhaul, ditching the previous tiny
preview in favour of a full-screen, GPU-accelerated preview that shows changes
in real time. It's of particular benefit to Mac users, for whom Lighting
Effects disappeared in Adobe Photoshop CS5 unless they were running the program
in sluggish 32-bit mode.
Tool enhancements
Designers
will love the new Paragraph and Character Style panels in Photoshop CS6, which
allow favourite combinations to be set and adjusted at will - as well as the
fact that Shapes layers are now true vector objects, which means you can now
apply strokes inside, outside and centred on paths, as well as being able to
stroke open paths. Those strokes can now be dotted and dashed, and can be
filled with gradients.
Adobe
Photoshop CS6 will now not only save in the background, allowing you to carry
on working while it's saving, but will also auto-save a version avery few
minutes so that, in the event of a crash, you can pick up from where you left
off. If you still manually revert to a saved file, though, it will always go
back to the one you deliberately chose to save, rather than its own
intermediate version.
Photoshop CS6 Crop tool
The Crop
tool has been reworked so that cropping now pans the image behind the crop
window. It seems a little unintuitive at first, until you rotate a crop, when
it suddenly makes sense: now, the image rotates behind the window, so you can
see how it will look without having to crane your neck as you did previously.
The Select
Color Range tool now has an option to select skin tones - and, within it, a
separate option to select faces. In practice, it works remarkably well: it's
not perfect, and when used in conjunction with a mask on an Adjustment Layer it
will require some manual fine-tuning, but it's a big help.
Extending Actions in Photoshop
CS6
Actions,
the means by which you can automate repetitive tasks, have been extended so
that they can now store brush movements as well as menu and selection choices.
This means that for the first time it's possible to record an entire painting
operation, and have it played back with a single keystroke.
Layer tweaking
Photoshop
CS6 includes a lot of small enhancements that will generally make much life
easier for those working on complex artwork. The Layers panel now has built-in
filtering, so you can choose to view just layers set to Hard Light mode, or
those containing text, or Smart Objects, or Adjustment Layers - or just about
any parameter you can think of. It's now possible to change opacity, light mode
and colour coding on multiple layers, so if you search for all the text layers
in a document you can change them all to yellow for easy reference. The Mask
and Adjustment panels have now been combined in a new Properties panel, which
is resizable for ease of adjustment.
It's also
now possible not only to use Layer Groups as the basis of Clipping Masks, but
to apply Layer Effects to an entire Group - previously, they could be applied
only to individual layers. And the Eyedropper tool has now been tweaked so that
it can sample underlying layers as if intervening Adjustment Layers weren't
there, which makes patching and retouching very much easier.
Beyond image editing in Photoshop CS6
Users of
the Regular edition of Photoshop CS6 will be delighted to learn that movie
editing capability has made the leap over from the Extended edition. This means
everyone can now edit movies right inside the app: you can apply all the
standard selection of filters and distortions to moving images, as well as
adding animated layers on top.
You'll
still need to buy the Extended edition if you want to use the 3D Layer tools,
which have had a major overhaul in this release. New HUD controls allow you to
extrude, revolve and twist 3D objects directly in the middle of the artwork, as
well as adding bevels and inflation.
Creative Cloud update
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Now available as part of a Creative Cloud subscription,
Photoshop weighs in at around 670MB. Once you've signed up for Adobe's new
service, you simply download an installer app, which keeps tabs on the apps you
have on your system. And this isn't software 'in the cloud'; Adobe Photoshop
CS6 is still installed on your system, and you don't have to stay connected to
the web to use the app. This means that the initial download can take a fair
bit of time, so ensure you factor this in before you start the installation
process.
We've only
just started using Creative Cloud, but the option to store your files in the
cloud, quickly drag and drop images into the browser, create colour swatches
from your pics, and add the ASE swatch files to Photoshop is already getting us
excited. There's not a huge amount of integration with Photoshop just yet, but
with the option to roll out incremental updates via the Creative Cloud service,
we can't wait to see what Adobe has in store over the coming months.
ADOBE PREMIERE ELEMENTS 3
Adobe is still
making its mind up as to what a good interface for the consumer video editing
market consists of. Premiere Elements 2 looked significantly different to the
first incarnation, and version 3 is yet another radical departure. The
similarities with the Premiere Pro parent product are getting more and more
distant.
The new interface
retains the docked windows of the Premiere Elements 2, but the arrangement has
been changed considerably, with a much greater focus on tasks. Premiere
Elements 1 also took a task-based approach, but this imposed annoying
restrictions on the more seasoned editor – such as the separation between
Effects mode and Advanced Effects mode. In contrast, Premiere Elements 2 put
everything onscreen all the time, which was handy for experts but too busy for
beginners.
With Elements 3,
Adobe has taken one step back to go two steps forward. Four icons down the left
of the interface switch between the project’s media library, footage
acquisition, effects, and titling. But this only changes the contents of the
associated window, not the rest of the interface, which keeps things simple.
Another new feature for the beginner is the Sceneline view, which is now the
default. Again, this storyboard approach, where clips and transitions are
represented by single icons, is simpler for those unfamiliar with desktop video
editing.
There are also tabs
along the top, which offer the same functions as before but have been grouped
together. Overall, the new look addresses the biggest problem with the previous
version of Premiere Elements – that it was hard for absolute beginners to get
to grips with compared to the Ulead or Pinnacle alternatives. However, we did
find that when you want windows to float above the rest of the interface, such
as the capture applet, it’s too easy to accidentally dock them alongside other
windows, and hard to pull them out again afterwards.
Nevertheless,
version 3 is a big improvement for novices. But what about new features for
existing users? The most obvious addition is HDV support, which may not have
been a major omission for the majority in the past, but it did give the
competition a lead. Now you can capture from HDV camcorders, although we found
the automatic scene detection didn’t work with our Sony HVR-A1E. The Media Downloader
has also been redesigned, and now has a simplified Standard Dialog as well as
the Advanced Dialog, which corresponds to the original version. There’s an
Internet option as well, but this doesn’t take you to a Web-based clip library
as you might expect, but instead presents you with a gallery of editing ideas
in Flash video format on Adobe’s website.
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