Adobe Announces Even More New Features for Photoshop at Event in NYC

Adobe Announces Even More New Features for Photoshop at Event in NYC

on Feb 12th 2012 with 17 comments

Last weekend, I attended a couple of Photoshop Sneak Peek events that were sponsored by Adobe in New York City. At the event, Photoshop Sr. Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes gave live presentations of some of the features they are working on for the next version of Photoshop. Some of what Hughes showed has already been announced in previous sneak peeks but he also demonstrated some never before seen features, as well. In this article, I will give you a quick recap of some of what I learned about the next version of Photoshop while I was there.

We already know that the next version of Photoshop will include a darker interface. They gave Photoshop a darker interface for a couple of reasons; to help showcase the artwork that you are working on, and to make it more consistent with other Adobe apps like Lightroom. What you may not know about the new interface is that in order to make this happen, Adobe had to create 1800 new icons and 250 new cursors. So clearly, Adobe has put a lot of work into the design of the new interface.

In addition to the new interface, we also know that the new version of Photoshop will include several performance enhancements that will reduce tiling and lag while working with large images. At the event, Hughes showed how the new version of Photoshop will not lag or tile while using liquify. He also explained how the liquify brush now expands to 15,000 pixels, which is a huge improvement from CS5. This is fantastic news for retouchers who frequently use the liquify feature.

In addition to liquify, Hughes also explained background save, a feature that was previously mentioned in a sneak peek video. What you may not know however is that in addition to background save, the new version of Photoshop will also include crash recovery. So if Photoshop crashes on you while you are working on a project, you should be able to recover your document. Note: crash recovery was only mentioned at the event. It was not demonstrated. So I don’t know exactly how it will work.

Dashed and dotted lines is also a feature that was discussed at the event. If you’ve ever needed to use dashed or dotted lines in Photoshop, you know what an awesome new feature this is. In previous versions it could take you 20 minutes to produce this effect. It can now be done in seconds.

Previously Un-Announced Features

In addition, to the features that we already know about, Hughes also explained some previously unannounced features that had never been seen in public. These features were Content Aware Move and Adaptive Wide Angle.

Let’s start with Content Aware Move. This new feature will allow you to make a selection and then move those pixels to another part of your image without having to use multiple layers. Take a look at the video below to see it in action.

In addition to Content Aware Move, we also saw Adaptive Wide Angle, a feature that will allow you to quickly correct for lens distortion. Take a look at the video below.

What Do You Think?

What do you think about these new features? Are you excited to see them? What other new features would you like to see?

 
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Grant Friedman is a veteran blogger, social media addict, and design enthusiast. Grant has been blogging about the design industry since 2008 and is currently the editor of Psdtuts. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about Psdtuts, feel free to direct them to Grant's Twitter account.  

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  • http://pinoyscreencast.net pinoyscreenccast

    Just can’t wait for the release! the new features are totally awesome photoshop keeps getting better

  • Tommy

    lens blurs on smart objects please!

  • L

    Thanks for the info.

    Did you catch any news if the Deblurring Technology they previewed at Max will make it into CS6?

  • adam pominski

    would love to update to the new cs6 softwares when available but its too damn expensive! :(

  • John

    I love that C3PO was in the audience.

  • Peter

    Content Aware Move looks like it does nothing that Content Aware Fill couldn’t have done. Make a selection, copy it onto a new layer, CAF that selection on the original layer, move the layer above to the destination. It’s not something that comes up in an everyday workflow enough to warrant a tool of its own unless there is something else there that wasn’t shown in the video. I never want my original layer modified anyway, so even when using that tool, I’d probably duplicate the layer, run the effect, reselect, delete the areas that were not changed and then split the layer in one layer for the patch for the source position and one for the moved object.

    The darker interface isn’t something I find useful. I have set my window background around the image to 18% gray, that’s enough darkness for me to judge color accurately, I don’t need panels and windows to be dark, too, especially not at the cost of Adobe using weird ustom skinned controls again instead of the native system widgets. Custom interface elements always behave stangely and unintuitively in certain situations (that horrendous XMP File Info dialog is a prime example).

    The enhancements to the vector tools like finally an antialiased rendering of paths in the viewport and the dashed and dotted lines are certainly welcome, but dotted lines were simple enough to create before, and for vector-heavy pixel artwork, Fireworks is a much better tool anyway. The only enhancement in that area that could really get me to upgrade would be if they finally added Spacebar-drag of anchor points (like every other Adobe application has it) for the Pen tool or if they finally added real featherable vector masks like After Effects has them (mask softness in the masks panel is way to slow and doesn’t offer much control).

    The Camera Raw enhancements are nice, but the new process as seen in Lightroom currently still lacks decent control for the midtones in an image, which means I end up having to manipulatie the point curve for almost every single photo. If they address that problem in the final, the new Camera Raw could be useful, but one could probably also get all of Lightroom for the upgrade price of Photoshop.

    Adaptive Wide Angle looks nice, but I don’t work on many extreme wide angle images. If that tool is flexible enough to be misused for creative things (like spline-based warping), it could be interesting, but other than that it will probably only be a real upgrade reason for people who shoot with fisheye lenses a lot.

    Performance enhancements and background save could definitely be a reason to upgrade if significant enough (no longer having to wait five minutes every time I hit save on big high-resolution composites and posters is a big plus), but otherwise I’m underwhelmed so far with what I have seen. Let’s see what the other stuff like the rumored new Blur tools, Video-LUT adjustment layers etc. turn out to be like.

  • Stas

    I would like to see Photoshop CS6 at the Mac App Store. That will be stone breaking feature to buy this product for me.

  • http://www.enblancocreativo.com Enblanco Creativo

    Great features in this version but expensive to update.

  • Trevor

    Looks great but any upgrade to far to expensive for Pensioners who only use Photoshop as a hobby, Adobe should appreciate this and offer concessions for amateur users.

  • MrMulder

    Still no exciting features for web designers then. Indesign-like Character Stylesheets Please

  • http://mypkl.wordpress.com Levi

    I’m with the others who are looking for the debarring technology they demoed earlier this year. That was pretty sweet.

  • naftolimann

    I Still want Text styles and a preset browser, how does anybody with more than a few brushes or patterns manage to find anything?!

    • L

      I agree with naftolimann 100%. It is a much needed feature. What I have done to manage brushes is take my brushes and group them by category (ie: Light Brushes, Smoke Brushes, etc) and then save them that way. It saves me time but it is still a pain to go through and manage.

  • http://www.kreativtheme.com Kreativ Theme

    Attention to details, this is the reason why Photoshop is number one …

  • MisterK

    I would like a searchable layers palette. You start typing and it only shows layers that contain those words. Spotlight on my Mac already can see layer names in the file metadata (you can search your Mac for a file if you know a layer name).

    More color profile presets included by default for top devices and displays (or a built in “store” for them)

    Ability to color code multiple folders at once.

    Multiple iterances of the same layer effect. Maybe I want two strokes on the same layer.

  • naftolimann

    thanks L! finally someone acknowledged the fact that we need some basic stuff besides useless gimmicks like content aware.

  • Henrik Helmers

    From a web design point of view, it won’t be long until you can mock things up faster in a web browser than in Photoshop, with the benefit of being able to plug in live data and change elements dynamically.

    How about a new version of the .PSD format with support for custom layer effects? Or the possibility to save smaller (and paletted 32bit) PNGs or even export directly to Base64 encoded URIs? A bit more intuitive asset management (like InDesign libraries)?