Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 22, 2012. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
While Photoshop CS5.5 more or less languished, Photoshop CS6 brings the flagship back to the fore. It could be said that the new Photoshop has learned from its little brother Lightroom and its big brother Premiere Pro. The already mentioned innovation of the dark user interface is based not only on a fashion trend, but on a sophisticated study. The dark design no longer distracts from the current image content and thus provides greater concentration. The key phrase here is “Immersive User Interface”. Lighter designs are still available, however. In addition to the actual colour changes, all icons have also been revised for even more intuitive navigation.
Saving in the background is no longer a pipe dream. When images several gigabytes in size are being saved, work can continue elsewhere in the meantime.
The larger updates include, for example, Camera Raw 7; brightening shadows now works even better and the clarity of an image is now free of unwanted side effects. All the settings in this palette have been revised.
Photoshop CS6 gains plenty of speed through the implementation of the Mercury Graphics Engine, which is already used in Premiere Pro. The advantage here is that GPU acceleration provides relief particularly for computationally intensive effects and brushes, ensuring real-time operations. This makes not only the Liquify filter noticeably faster and more effective. But for this filter in particular, Adobe touted a tenfold increase in the maximum size.
New effects and plenty of power behind them
Adaptive Wide Angle is a new function that allows distracting curves in the image to be selectively straightened. This will please anyone who works with fisheye and wide-angle lenses. The trimming/cropping tool is now very heavily based on Lightroom. Photos can now be moved within the image section, straightened and composed using a rule-of-thirds grid.
Content Aware Fill is overtaken by Content Aware Move. This context-sensitive movement of parts of an image has now become significantly more intelligent. Previously, the resulting empty area was filled automatically, but now users can select separately what the empty space should be filled with.
The blur tools have also gained additions. A total of three new filters are in the program. Selective blurs can be controlled via a radial selection. Objects in the foreground and outside this radius can be excluded from the blur. There is also now a tilt-shift effect, known from the effects of photographing small model landscapes.
3D completely renewed
Friends of 3D also get something. Work on 3D objects has been improved considerably. If, for example, users wanted to create and animate 3-dimensional text, this was very laborious at the time because every light had to be positioned manually. Now, however, this work is carried out automatically with just a few clicks.
The small but useful features include, for example, simple highlighting of areas. An outline can be added to the selection tool, and its appearance can also vary. It is perfect for quick marking work.
Here is the beta: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/photoshopcs6/
