Adobe Photoshop CS6 Review: Faster Performance, Useful Editing Enhancements - deschampshignigho

Adobe Photoshop CS6, the modish version of the cornerstone of the company's Creative Suite of applications, borrows a little magic from its suitemate Premiere Pro. Of course, Photoshop CS6 ($699 A of 6/1/2012) adds a little magic of its own in this significant rise.

Reinforced GPU Acceleration

Photoshop has had some form of GPU acceleration for at least a few versions, but Photoshop CS6 improves on that with a unprecedented Mercury Graphics Engine, in replaceable fashion to Adobe Premiere Pro CS6's Mercury Playback Locomotive, which is responsible for that video editing application's impressive public presentation. In Photoshop CS6, several tools are GPU-accelerated, including some filters, the substantially updated cropping tool, and 3D functions in Photoshop CS6 Extended. It lets you unconstricted and go with big files and larger brushes, and, according to Adobe, it "helps you navigate documents and your workspace more fluidly."

To test the engine, I opened a 600MB image with 20 layers using a four-year-yellow dual-Xeon workstation, with graphics acceleration turned on and past inside-out off. In either mode, the image open in the Same amount of money of time, and I had no trouble flicking the image or so my screen. But with GPU acceleration randy, the image continued to glide a chip after I'd let go of my mouse.

Furthermore, or s features, such as the new Oil Paint filter, refused to exploit with GPU acceleration inverted off, and the Liquify tool strongly suggested that I please turn it back happening. With speedup enabled, those features flew–disregardless what place setting I tried, disregardless how big the brush–and I never had to wait for a progress block u to completed. You aren't limited to choosing from only a undersize number of art cards, as well; see Adobe's leaning of cards that it has tested and official to work.

The updated cropping tool has many new features. It encourages a new way of cropping, which is nondestructive–meaning, when you crop an image, you can choose to retain (but hide) the planted pixels, so that if you need them back later, you can nettle them without starting o'er. You can as wel save cropping presets–your internet site's accepted size up for thumbnail images, sound out. Newborn overlay grids helper you to lop with precision.

Photoshop's new Perspective Crop tool; notice how the Mrs. Henry Wood piece's whirligig edge is straightened.

The sword-new Perspective Crop is an excellent tool–with it, you draw a cropping boxwood over an image that has been taken at an angle that skews or distorts the visualise, and so adjust where one or more of the corners of your pictur should Be. The tool can tidy the figure and subtly enlarge portions of your image that are down-position (farther away) to make the entire pictur flavour straight.

A original GPU-accelerated blur tool adds many a features, besides. In a window with connected-image controls, you can ascertain the amount of confuse, set areas that do not baffle blurred, the amount of feather, and the angle of film over. These give you great control, though I wasn't wowed by the control that sets the amount of blur–you spin it like an iPod bicycle, but in a tiny area. The window has sliders you can apply instead, though.

But the tool I found most stately is Mental object-Aware Move. As with Photoshop's other content-alert tools, this one analyzes alive pixels to knockoff large swaths of pixels for use elsewhere in your image. For example, in an image of a person before of a background only I half-liked, I was able to draw a rough excerpt around the person, then utilization the Content-Aware Move tool to ringer the desirable portion of the background terminated the undesired area in one step, leaving the person unemotional, even though the selection I'd made was far from perfect.

I had less-good results with the updated Patch tool. As with the previous version of this tool, IT often picked up pixels I didn't want it to when I used it to erase objects in an image. In certain spots, it works fine, though.

Photoshop CS6 adds Text computer menu controls, including formatting of ordinals and fractions.

What's Your Type?

For some projects, especially ones that that incorporate text, I've found that I have to choose between Adobe Photoshop and Adobe brick InDesign. That may find less ofttimes now that Photoshop CS6 has ramped-up text tools. CS6 regards school tex arsenic so important that it now has a Text edition menu, and information technology has several new controls over text, including the ability to formatting ordinals and fractions properly. A new type-rendering engine, which supports OpenType, makes text appear cleaner and sharper. You can even glue in lorum ipsum placeholder text mechanically, and you can imitate the expressive style of one block of textual matter and apply that same vogue on text elsewhere.

Photoshop has had a 'Save for Web' feature for a long time, but it still doesn't compress images as substantially or as much as its suitemate Adobe Fireworks does–Fireworks produces significantly small file sizes than Photoshop does. So, if you motivation Photoshop's tools for your Web-bound graphics, you nonetheless should create in Photoshop, save your Photoshop file and open it in Fireworks, and then exportation your final pictur. That's not an nonpareil workflow, though.

Photoshop has had basic television editing features for a few versions, but its capabilities have been enhanced with CS6. You can open 70 incompatible video formats in Photoshop CS6 and add layers–er, tracks–trim, add basic video and audio transitions, employ effects and like, then export the consequence as a video in nonpareil of trey formats using a built-in version of Media Encoder. Adobe says Photoshop does video because of the popularity of shot video with digital SLRs, and I suppose this is a great addition for folks who don't have or want to learn Premiere Pro, but differently, it simply doesn't do enough for Pine Tree State to see the point.

I certainly do see the point in the addition–last–of a new interface-text-size setting. Those of us who ingest been peering at computer monitors for most of our lives and have the poor sightedness to show for it will appreciate that Photoshop now lets you Seth the menus to display small, medium, or large text. With the orthogonal marquee tool selected, I measured the difference in the size of the toolbar on my screen; the "small" setting premeditated 796 pixels broad-brimmed, the "cooked" setting came in at 845 pixels wide, and the "large" setting came in at 888 pixels comprehensive. That's only about a 5 to 6 percent increase per step, and it's barely noticeable–but it's still welcome. Unfortunately, none of the new CS6 applications have it.

Another bitty but useful interface addition: The Layers palette instantly has filters, so with the pawl of a button, you can show only text layers, or only pixel, adjustment, work, OR smart-objective layers (or combinations of those types), and you can toggle the filtering with the come home of one small button. It's a cause of death lineament if you'Ra functioning connected documents with mountain of layers.

Rush along Is of the Essence

GPU acceleration has had a huge do good in television editing software–well, mostly Adobe brick's video editing software–thusly it's nice to hear information technology receive such emphasis in Photoshop. It makes Photoshop CS6 seem fresh, and fast, and if the course followed aside Premiere Pro is any indication, those features are simply the beginning.