I have been using CS5 for about a week now and i got to say it blows away any other version i had before.
I’ve had a few people looking at me blank as to why i’m near fever pitch about this program, let me explain.
Camera Raw 6.0
For any of you playing around with Lightroom Beta 3, you know all about the major changes to raw processing (better color, sharpening, noise, vignetting and effects – as before Camera Raw retains feature parity with Lightroom’s Develop module)…but one of my favorite ways to use noise reduction is in REVERSE. In the image below, you can see that heavy noise reduction and little (to no) detail can soften the image to the point where it almost looks like an illustration. Reversing Clarity is a popular way to soften skin, I think this will be too.
Another new feature in version 6.0 is Additive Grain; yes, it can be used to mimic TMAX 3200, etc. – but I think the real strength is establishing a bit of grain consistency prior to compositing images. Have you ever noticed how synthetic a 100 ISO image married to a 3200 ISO looks? With a sprinkle of additive grain (and it really doesn’t take much), the unbelievable is suddenly very realistic.
Mini Bridge
For those of you who liked the File Browser, you’ll love Mini Bridge (I know I do). From full-screen previews (spacebar) of any file (including your DSLR video) to multi-file operations like Panos, the new HDR Pro, batch, etc. – “MB” has you covered. Mini Bridge runs in a panel, so it’s right there in Photoshop…fast, convenient, scalable (MB can be an icon, stretched panel…even a photo tray – great for multi-monitors). I drive everything from Mini Bridge.
Healing
Content-Aware Fill is enjoying an incredible amount of attention (on the off chance you haven’t seen this yet, take a look), but have you heard that the Content-Aware Fill smarts are also wired to the Spot Healing Brush? That should speak to how fast the technology is; we don’t wire such things to a brush unless they really sing. Granted, Spot Healing is a great tool, but it never really liked power lines or edge content – those things are no longer a problem.
Wire removal deserves a brief tutorial:
-drop a path on the wire or wires
-close the path
-select the Spot Healing Brush (make sure that Content-Aware Fill is checked in the option bar)
-make your brush ~2x the size of the wire
-navigate to the Path panel, select your wire path
-choose, “stroke brush with path” from the path panel – done!
This is only a small piece of whats changed, they also have Real Full Blown HDR inside the program itself.
To show you what convinced me, here is Adobe’s video on Content aware fill.
