Adobe Photoshop CS6

The key questions any user will be asking about the new Adobe Photoshop CS6 (from $699 or $199 for upgrades) are, "Does it do even cooler things with my images? Does it perform better? Is it easier to work with?" The answer to all of these questions, I'm happy to report, is a resounding Yes. You would think that after a program has been the leader in its field for over 20 years, there wouldn't be much to add. But quite the opposite is the case with Adobe Photoshop CS6 , which improves both basic operations like cropping, along with tons of more nitty-gritty detail functions like adding dotted-lines to strokes.

In fact, the new version adds 62 percent more new features than the previous version, including a speed boost and some jaw-dropping new "content aware" tricks. Photoshop's interface, too, gets a welcome upgrade, thanks to some trimming and clever improvements—though the company is careful to always offer the option of reverting to the earlier look.

The new version will thrill nearly all categories of users, from photographers to designers. It isn't cheap, at $699 and $999 for the Extended edition (which adds 3D editing), though upgrades cost $199 and $399, respectively. A new Adobe option, Creative Cloud, gets you the Extended version along with the rest of the Creative Suite, starting at $49 a month. Despite its cost, Photoshop remains the ultimate image editor on the planet, though other apps, like Corel Paint Shop Pro ($80, 3.5 stars), GIMP (Free, 4 stars), and Serif PhotoPlus ($90, 2.5 stars) have tried to unseat Adobe's app. It's refreshing to see the makers of such a successful program not sitting on their laurels, but instead continuing to make impressive advances in their art.

Cleaner Interface
The Photoshop interface can be intimidating to even the most hardened software user. This time around, Adobe decided to ease up on its users' eyes by eliminating a redundant toolbar and adding several more slick interface tricks. That includes side panels, like those for history or layers, that can optionally display only when you're using them—click back into your image, and the flyout panel can auto-hide (with a preference setting.). Little touches like this alone make Photoshop CS6 a huge productivity booster and frustration eliminator.

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One interface change will strike long-time users the second they see the new Photoshop: It uses the dark gray seen in most modern photo applications. You can, however, switch this back if you prefer the old way, or choose an intermediate shade. And by default, your images will open in tabs against the dark gray program window, instead of free-floating against your distracting wallpaper. Another change is that Mini Bridge is clearly labeled (as opposed to "MB," its former monicker), and runs along the bottom in a filmstrip view—much more useful than the extra right-panel it added previously. Less obvious is the thorough edit the interface itself has undergone to standardize spelling and grammar in all its messages and controls.

Faster Performance
Adobe has sped up Photoshop (and Bridge, which has been rewritten for 64-bit processors) by using Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine, which uses your system's graphics hardware (both AMD and Nvidia), to speed up image processing. Formerly, this was only used for video, but CS6 brings it into image processing, too. The program also now processes in the background, so you don't have to wait long after you hit Save, and an Auto-save automatically saves recovery info every 10 minutes by default, à la Microsoft Office. Adobe claims the program is up to 1,000 times faster for some operations. I still occasionally had to wait for some operations, though—particularly the new content-aware move and patch tools, on my low-power iMac 2.5-GHz Core i5 computer.

New Camera Raw
Like Lightroom 4, Photoshop CS6 gets a completely new Camera Raw process. The sliders have changed both in name and operation. With the new 2012 image process come some new defaults and capabilities. Sliders for adjustments like Brightness, Contrast, and Blacks now all sit right in the middle of their tracks at zero, letting you slide them up and down. In the past, a photo's brightness slider would indicate +50, Contrast +25, and Blacks +5 right after import. The new setup, with everything set to a 0 baseline and slider motion up to 100 and down to -100 makes sense—but you can switch back to the earlier process if you prefer.

I was also thrilled to see that the lens correction was able to remove some chromatic aberration, along with vignetting and geometric distortion (usually near high-contrast edges of a wide shot). Photoshop's Camera Raw sub-app now supports over 400 lens profiles, with all the brands you've heard of represented, and many you probably haven't.

Auto correction is now content aware, too. You could use the Auto setting on a hundred different images and get a hundred different adjustment combinations. Adobe found that when it polled users, the vast majority claimed they never used Auto, but telemetry (automated opt-in online program feedback) told another story: about two thirds of users did employ the Auto option. I find that it's a good starting point; see what the program thinks should be done, and then make my own adjustments.

New Crop Tool
If a renewed interface wasn't enough, that Adobe would change such a basic and heavily used feature as the crop tool tells you something about the depth of this update. Now, the whole image is selected when you begin a crop, rather than Photoshop guessing a crop size for you. And when you make a crop now, it's non-destructive (as all edits in Lightroom are), meaning you can go back to the uncropped image and re-crop at any time. When you use the tool to rotate an image, now, instead of the selection box rotating, the image does, so you can see what the final result looks like before executing the crop—much more useful than the old way. You can use ratio presets or create your own custom ones. The tool now can display overlays, including rule of thirds, golden ration, and diagonal axes to help with your crop decisions.

Video
Formerly only available in the Extended edition, video editing has come to Photoshop Standard edition. And it brings some impressive video-editing power, along with the ability to apply all of Photoshop's still image adjustments to video clips—including exposure, cropping, filters…you name it. Photoshop is even capable of multitrack and keyframing, using the same fast rendering engine that powers Adobe's Premiere pro video editor. But only a few transition options are available—all variants of fades. Each video track you add becomes a Photoshop layer that can be individually adjusted.

You also get all the standard digital, video-editing tools, joining, splitting, and trimming clips. Audio tools are minimal, but you can set an audio track's volume percent, fade it in, fade it out, or mute it. Movie files are saved as .PSDs, but by choosing File|Export|Render Video… you can create a video file with H.264, QuickTime, or DPX encoding. You also get a decent choice of resolutions, including 720p and 1080p HD. Rendering a 1:26 minute HD video took just three minutes on my 2.5-GHz Core i5 with 4GB RAM.

New Filters and Tricks
The Filters menu has been trimmed from 13 to eight filter groups. The Filter Gallery doesn't show up as often as before—previously there were over 60 redundant links in the interface to the gallery, and this has been drastically reduced. One cool new filter that gets its own place on the Filter menu is Adaptive Wide Angle. This new tool lets you draw lines on distorted wide angle shots to correct their geometry. It can also simply apply a focal length correction.

Several photo applications have basic geometry correction, such as ACDSee Pro, letting you correct things like the pincushion and barrel effects that result from extreme wide angle or telephoto shots. But Photoshop takes this kind of correction to another level with the Adaptive Wide Angle tool. You see, when you take a wide angle shot, your camera isn't always pointing directly at the subject; if you're pointing up at a building, for example. Photoshop CS6 lets you correct the fish-eye correction further, by drawing lines on the image to indicate what should be a straight line. The results, and just the fact that the app can do this, are remarkable. My test images looked far more natural than if I'd used a simple lens correction.

Also new among filters is a Blur Gallery. This tool isn't just about adding blur to your whole photo, but about applying hot effects like selective focus (aka "bokeh") and "tilt-shift," which gives images a miniature look. It offers excellent control over what's in focus in the image, often a face.

Content Aware Move and Patch
One of the most magical new tools in Photoshop is Content-Aware Move. This lets you select an object and move in while preserving the background. It also lets you place multiple instances of an object onto a background. It works best with consistent background textures like grass, sand, or sky. When I used it on less uniform backgrounds, I could see evidence of the move. But as with many Photoshop tools, those who set out to master this will surely get more convincing results than I did.

Content Aware Patch is a related new tool. Don't mistake this for a mere blemish remover, which any self-respecting photo-editing app includes. Content Aware Patch actually lets you remove objects from a scene. I was able to convincingly remove a person in the background while preserving the grass, trees, and sky in the image.

Drawing
The latest Photoshop not only adds features for photographers and videographers, but artists, designers illustrators, and typographers get some spiffy new tools, too. Shapes offer more flexibility: Photoshop now lets you copy shape attributes such as fill pattern and paste to multiple objects. And you can add new shapes without creating a new layer. More control over vector and raster shape manipulation, such as alignment, is also possible.

Newly enhanced airbrush tips let you apply, for example, stripes or swirls in new ways. New "erodible" brushes and pencils mimic their real-world counterparts, with lead and ink that runs out. And there's now a brightness/contrast slider for textures when you're painting.

One of the most-requested features in Photoshop has been dotted and dashed lines: They're here now, and with lots of control. You can simply add them to in the Stroke Options box with any object selected. You can change the length, thickness, and color of both the dashes, and even fill the dashes or dots with a gradient.

Layers and JDIs
Users of many layers will benefit greatly from the CS6 update. Now you can create vector layers using the custom shapes tool, and then apply strokes and fills. The new layer search shows up as a magnifying glass at the top of the Filter panel and lets you isolate particular layers based on several criteria you can combine, including name, type, effect, mode, attribute, and color. Lots of subchoices under each of these lets you zero in on just the layers you want.

Adobe has come up with a new acronym for small features requested by users: JDI—"Just Do It." These are program features that don't require a massive amount of development time and effort, but nevertheless make a productivity difference to users in their everyday work. For CS6, the software maker has implemented no fewer than 65 JDIs, many of them involving layers. Some of these include a new menu item that deletes a layer effect instead of just disabling it, dither options to layer styles for gradient overlays and gradient strokes, and bicubic sharper and bicubic smoother options when you're free transforming layers.

New Text Tools
Not only has Adobe added text and paragraph custom style capabilities, but it's even added a new Type main menu choice and a new Typography workspace option. Defining the styles doesn't require you to define every property—you can just change on and save a new style. Also new is the ability to mix alphabets in the same document—Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and the Katakana and Hiragana versions of Japanese can all exist in the same document. Finally, we now get a Lorem Ipsum generator to save you from some cutting and pasting.

3D
Photoshop's 3D content creation capabilities are only available in the Extended edition ($999). These include new reflections, drag-able shadows, new alignment and object distribution tools, and faster performance, using Adobe's Mercury Graphics Engine. The ability to extrude your visual objects into 3D forms and choose a lighting source from any direction in 3D space is pretty mind-blowing. You can also now create 2D/3D composites, for example, overlaying a 2D photo onto a 3D object, complete with lighting source points.

Minor Qualms
One thing I wish Photoshop would include on the Mac side is support for Photo Stream, which not only makes accessing snapshots from your iPhone easy from your computers or iPad, but can even make Camera Raw files available. And in such a large program, it's inevitable that some among the multitude of activities are still less than intuitive, requiring some deep menu navigation. The video editing interface is an example of this, with plenty of potential for confusion among tracks and layers.

The New Gold Standard of Image Editing
With CS6, Photoshop maintains its lead as the most powerful, most state-of-the art photo and image editor/enhancer on the planet. Even beyond what I've covered here, a wealth of new capabilities and ease awaits users of Photoshop CS6. And while the update is not such a drastic overhaul that it will rattle longtime users, it does add significant improvements for all types of Photoshop users—photographers, visual artists, and designers.

In addition to improving the interface and adding features like the Content Aware tools and video editing capabilities, the creators of Photoshop continue to improve performance with techniques like graphics hardware acceleration, multicore use, and 64-bit support. All of this adds up to a superb upgrade that should make anyone serious about image editing salivate over Photoshop CS, PCMag's undisputed Editors' Choice for image editing.

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