Photoshop CS6 has arrived! Discover the hottest new features. Hear what the world's best designers have to say about this new version.
Those looking for the much-heralded Deblur filter will be disappointed: it's far too early for inclusion this time around. In fact, those looking for big splashy show-off features in Photoshop CS6 will also be looking in vain.
Adobe Photoshop CS6 is largely an under-the-bonnet release, bringing a few new tools and filters but concentrating on greater speed, efficiency and ease of use. But the improvements are great, and this Photoshop CS6 review will reveal all!
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.
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