Adobe Photoshop CS5: First look

Adobe has launched Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop CS5 Extended, its flagship image editing and compositing programs. Both versions are packed with new features and technology improvements. Photoshop CS5 Extended offers everything in Photoshop CS5, but adds advanced tools for artists working with 3D or motion-based content.

Among the major updates are features such as Content-Aware Fill, Puppet Warp, and HDR Pro and HDR Toning. There are also new painting effects, a new version of the Camera Raw plug-in, automated lens correction, flexible custom panels, a new workspace switcher, and more. Technology advances include new GPU-accelerated features, faster performance with 64-bit support, and improvements to the OpenGL engine.

“The past two decades have demonstrated an amazing interplay between customers who want to push the limits of their personal creativity and a passionate team of Adobe engineers who make those visions a reality,” said Kevin Connor, vice president of product management for professional digital imaging at Adobe. We experienced this firsthand when we posted a ‘sneak peek’ video of the team’s work on the Content Aware Fill feature a few weeks ago. It quickly became the number one viral video online, with close to 2 million views...This version of Photoshop has some of the most innovative and extraordinary technologies to ever come from our labs and clearly customers are already clamoring for it.”

The new version of Photoshop also offers enhanced media management and Web Gallery integration with Adobe Bridge CS5 and the new Adobe Mini Bridge, both included in the program. Streamlined creative reviews are now available through integration with Adobe CS Review, part of Adobe’s new CS Live online services.

Photoshop CS5

With the new version of Photoshop, Adobe revisits the Refine Edge dialog and adds new functionality to it. Intelligent selection technology offers better edge detection and faster, more accurate masking results with complex subjects. Automatic color decontamination helps eliminate background color around the edges of a selection.

Photoshop CS5's edge detection and decontaminate colors features help you make precise selections of complex subjects, enabling faster, more accurate compositing of multiple images.

Photoshop CS5 introduces the new Content-Aware Fill feature that lets you remove an image element and replace it with details that match the lighting, tone, and noise of the surrounding area so that it looks like the object never existed. New in Photoshop CS5 is HDR Pro, a feature that gives you more control over the HDR merging process and greater adjustment power over the mapping of tones and the styling of HDR output. You can even create the look of an HDR-processed image from a single photo with the new HDR Toning feature.