ArticlesSoftware/App ReviewsPhotoshop CS6 Beta: New Features for Photographers

Photoshop CS6 Beta: New Features for Photographers

By Amadou Diallo | Published Mar 22, 2012 | Software/App Reviews

Tagged with: adobe photoshop software

Photoshop CS6 JDIs

In this latest release, Adobe has continued its focus on JDI (Just Do It) enhancements. Based on user feedback and requests, these are relatively small, but productivity-enhancing changes that Photoshop's engineer's are allowed to take time out of the normal development cycle to implement. Users of the public beta will come across more than 50 such enhancements, so we've provided a JDI list organized by category.

Category	JDI	Notes
Brushes	Option for HUD brush vertical movement to adjust opacity instead of hardness	Enable this change in Preferences
	Maximum brush size increased to 5000px
	Change color dynamics to per stroke instead of per tip	User can revert to old behavior
	Brightness/contrast slider for textures when painting
	Brush projection for static tips
	Brush cursor reflects brush dynamics for round and captured tips
Eyedropper	Show the sample size popup for the various eyedropper tools
	Option to ignore adjustment layers for the eyedropper tool	New menu item in the Options bar pulldown
	New mode for eyedropper to select layers current and below	New menu item in the Options bar pulldown
File Formats	Read common stereo image pair formats (JPS, PNS)
	Allow for more bit depths in TIFF files
	Read BIGTIFF format
	Give the user choices regarding how they want transparency treated in OpenEXR on file open
Grammar	Standardized grammar throughout app
	Use consistent grammar style in the title of dialog windows	No commands such as 'Choose a color:'
Layers	Added a contextual menu item that deletes a layer effect instead of just disabling it
	Added dither options to Layer Styles for Gradient Overlay and Gradient Stroke
	Keyboard shortcut of 00 to set layer opacity to 0%	Use Shift+00 to set fill opacity to 0%
	Added bicubic sharper & bicubic smoother options when free transforming layers
	Allow changing of blend modes for multiple layers simultaneously
	Allow locking of multiple layers
	Allow Cmd+J to duplicate layers and layer group
	Allow changing of color labels for multiple layers simultaneously
	Layer tooltips to include layer name	Works only if a name is defined
	Opt+click on toggle arrows (groups and effects) in layer panel to close all targets
	Show blend if/Blending Effects badge on layer
	Show correct opacity and blend mode values for hidden layers
	Tab goes to next layer on inline layer rename, Shift+Tab goes to previous
	New command to raster layer effect into layer, merging the selected layers into themselves
	Reorder effects in the layers palette to match the Z-order style/blend mode
Liquify	Resize Liquify brush with shortcuts
	Increased maximum Liquify brush size and added option to load last mesh
Presets	Added new document presets for common devices (e.g. iPhone, iPad, etc.)
	Added new Gradient Map presets for toning and split-toning
	Sticky reorganization of tool presets	Changes maintained after re-launch
	Added Contact Sheet II as an Automation option
SDK	Added the ability to return an array of guides in a document from the scripting SDK
	Added the ability to access the tool name associated with the tool preset name via scripting
Selections	Marquee, lasso, and mask panel feather values support decimal places	Matches the feather dialog
	Remember feather radius when showing dialog for selection from a path
Transform	Improved dragging of vector curves
	Don't hide smart object icon when transforming a layer
	Undo or disable auto-rotate on open
UI	Removed the app bar and reduced the size of the drag/app bar by more than 30%
	Windows: New/open document options added to context click on a document tab	Previously a Mac-only feature
	Added 'Don't show again' checkbox to Purge warnings
Miscellaneous	Enabled Split Channels for documents with layers
	Select Hex field by default and allow clipboard pastes with '#' in contents	Cannow use #fffffff for example
	Increased GPU stability by prequalifying GPUs on the fly before use
	Auto-select the best resample method based on the type of resize
	Enabled Invert and Threshold adjustments for masks in 32 -bit
	Holding Shift during startup disables 3rd party plugins
	Added warning message that 16 bit images cannot display their file size in the Save as JPEG dialog

There's clearly a lot to explore in the Photoshop CS6 beta, even if you just look at the photography-related features. This is a beta process, however, so if you find a new tool that makes your jaw drop, wish Adobe had done things differently or have discovered a bug, make your voice heard on the CS6 beta feedback forum. It's your chance to help shape the final CS6 release.

System requirements

The minimum system requirements for Photoshop have changed, particularly for Mac users. Photoshop CS6 does not support 32-bit Macs. You must be running a 64-bit Intel processor and OS 10.6 or higher (read this Apple support document to determine whether your Mac has a 64-bit processor). On the Windows side, minimum requirements are Windows XP with Service Pack 3, Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 2, Windows 7, or Windows 8.

Photoshop CS6 uses its Monaco Engine to leverage the video card's GPU for many more tasks than in previous versions. Therefore the suggested minimum amount of memory for video cards is 512MB of VRAM.

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Comments

Total comments: 175

Nothing in life excites more than the news of an upgrade from Adobe.....

3 upvotes

Help ! Where is "image de-bluring' ???

2 upvotes

it is not in CS6.. and was never promised to be.
it was a "future tech" demo.

not a sneak peak of a CS 6 feature.

Comment edited 27 seconds after posting

0 upvotes

Interesting timing though don't you think? Maybe Adobe will get smart and sell it as a plug-in for users of any version of PS. Nah...that would make to much sense.

0 upvotes

Was there a mention of the release date. Or an educated guess based on past experience?

0 upvotes

spring 2012.. as in the text.

0 upvotes

...are new features (D800 oriented) included:

- downsample to D700 size
- downsample to D4 size
- downsample to 5dIII size

...just kidding of course.. just a little tired of comparisons of the new cameras at the same resolution...

I hope Adobe will release the final (stable) version of ACR 6.7 for CS5 ...

1 upvote

...there is an old feature build in to get your 5dM3 pictures the same size as the D800 at a better quality! ;-) called "Image (re)Size..."

0 upvotes

the new dark UI may looks nice on the screen.

but it is not good for photographer who PRINT their images.

a neutral grey background is imho still the best to judge an image and edit it.

i mean... i really like the LR interface from, a visual viewpoint, dark as it is.
but it leads to other color corrections then a grey background, because the human eye interprets the colors differently on different backgrounds.

sometimes when i switch from LR to photoshop i "notice" a slight colorshift.
but it is just perception.

Comment edited 1 minute after posting

4 upvotes

Lightroom 4 allows you to change the overall background now, making it lighter if you wish, or even darker.

0 upvotes

i know.. maybe because i bothered them with a dozend emails over the years. :)

1 upvote

Henry,
As I wrote in the article you can change both the Background Fill and Application frame independently. So you can set either or both to middle gray.

Comment edited 2 times, last edit 6 minutes after posting

0 upvotes

i know and i read that... i just say i doubt it´s usefullness for photographers.

0 upvotes

You can change the background to another color. Also, if you invoke soft-proofing, Photoshop will attempt to mimic the actual color of the paper on which you are printing, so that you can see how your print will look against that background.

0 upvotes

Same profiles?

0 upvotes

OIL PAINT FILTER! Om nom nom!!! WANT!!!

Brian

1 upvote

it´s in photoshop for quite a while when you install the free pixelbender plugin from adobe.

it´s nice for a while but becomes boring very fast.

Comment edited 24 seconds after posting

3 upvotes

Thanks - I didn't know that ...

... While I can imagine it becomes boring (like any other special effect), I do a lot of show posters for musical productions, and this kind of thing is a godsend!

Brian

0 upvotes

This is indeed a function of 'Pixelbender' behind the scenes. I think the AKVIS ART plugin works much better for a 'painterly' effect and is not all that expensive.

Comment edited 1 minute after posting

0 upvotes

Can't quite figure out why, but "pixel bender" sounds just a wee tad dodgy!

Brian

1 upvote

The "Content-Aware Move tool" looks great - but is the AUTHOR aware that these "ducks" are actually GEESE? Canada Geese, to be precise! LOL!!!

Brian

5 upvotes

Nice catch, Brian. It's fixed now.

1 upvote

Hehe! Thanks, Amadou - after all, you don't want anyone to think that dpreview is ...

... QUACKING up! :-)

Brian

Comment edited 3 minutes after posting

2 upvotes

i guess i would like the new acr (sadly i have to upgrade to cs6!)
and the ability to enlarge the curve adjustament layer (in cs5 or cs4 is very tiny)

does someone know if there is only the rule of third in the crop ?

PS hope cs6 will use as well the GPU and video memory , the minimum is 500MB of video card!

2 upvotes

you can enlarge that layer in CS 5 too.

1 upvote

how?
i mean the curve window size, i add a curve adjustament layer and the curve window is small,but i can't drag to make it more large

0 upvotes

it is in the setting of the panel "expand view".

0 upvotes

There are actually six different overlays in the crop tool: rule of thirds, grid, diagonal, triangle, Golden Ratio and Golden Triangle.

0 upvotes

If you can afford Cs6 you can afford a decent gpu..:-)

1 upvote

Auto Save open documents is a decade too late, Adobe...

2 upvotes

it´s here now.. so don´t whine.

3 upvotes

Ooooh, the oil-paint filter, I want the oil paint filter!

1 upvote

it´s in the free pixelbender plugin from adobe for quite a while.

it seems they just included it as standard filter into PS CS 6.

Comment edited 37 seconds after posting

0 upvotes

Henry: I think it is irony...;-)

0 upvotes

The example for Iris Blur that you show is unrealistic - the model's shirt should remain in focus as well, not just her neck and face (because the shirt has the same distance to the camera as the face).

Yet i am sure there will be many unrealistic "romantic dreamy" blurs starting from today all over the place. Face clear, all the rest blurred. It makes me feel dizzy.

In the case of the photo you're using in the blur example, the tilt-shift blur would have been more useful (in this case, it would not have created the typical trendy tilt-shift effect, but would have been useful anyway because of the way subject and background had been arranged).

2 upvotes

OMG! You can't completely replace a big sensor and expensive wide aperture lens with a piece of sftware yet?! That is so bad...

TBH. Making correct iris blur needs advanced 3D information, your pictures do not have this, they are 2D representations, so you can never get the result you are looking for, this have to be done even before your sensor captures the image...

And, that is an example. You can actually get some quite impresive results with iris blur, if you manually mask the areas as they are in a 3D scene and apply increasing amounts of blur pr. mask...

0 upvotes

Not really that hard, simple focus peaking in PS would work, with various degree of softening based on how high is contrast.

Tho its not that hard to make this manualy.

// Faking fast lens, since 2000. //

0 upvotes

@mescalamba... i would like to see an result of your manualy tries.

to really have a good fake bokeh/iris blur you need a depth map.
i am a 3d max user and i render out z-depth layers so i can use after effects for iris blur in videos. that works very good.

but if it would be that easy as you say, to fake it via focus peaking then alienskin or onone software would have made that already.
in the end they sell products for years that try to emulate a fast lens.

the problem is with focus peaking, you have a plane of focus but still no depth information for the object in the image.
a high contrast calculation can help... but will not work for every image.

0 upvotes

What you explain is called "knowing your craft" and as far as I know is not included in ANY version of CS6. :-)

0 upvotes

Humm, I like the interface. The only thing I immediately noted was that ACR no longer has a "fill light" - new controls to use :)

0 upvotes

As a user of LR4, the new controls are so much better IMHO. Where "fill light" was very rough on mid-tones, the new shadows control and black point is much easier to work with because they don't affect mid-tones in the same way. (black point, white point works like levels output control in PS, shadows work like "fill light" but only on the darker tones.

3 upvotes

TechRadar is reporting that the new deblur tool demonstrated at Adobe Max in October won’t be available in Photoshop CS6.

0 upvotes

Interesting ... !

Does that mean the demo was a little too contrived, or is there some other reason?

0 upvotes

Old story... Adobe have already admitted that their demonstration was fake and while the theory is still interesting, it is nowhere near usable yet.

0 upvotes

it was not fake you telling nonsense MadsR.

adobe admitted that the BLUR in ONE of the example images was computer generated and not actual BLUR created by CAMERA movement during the exposure. that´s it.

so get yout stuff together and don´t tell bul*hit.

@Dstudio.
the reason is that it was alpha demo.
you see in the demo they had to invoke an external program to calculate it.
to get such features into photoshop it takes some time.

in the end everyone will complain if it is not production ready or only works on 50% of all images.
look at content aware fill. there are some m*r*ns who wil tell everyone that it will not work and that it is useless. yet i use it EVERY DAY and it works.
if you know how to use it of course and how to deal with it´s limitations!!

Comment edited 5 times, last edit 15 minutes after posting

1 upvote

adobe did not fake anything.
it is quite common to use a gauss blur for blind deconvolution algorithms.

problem is the public will not understand it and think it is fake.
that is the problem with science... the public often has no clue.

"The fundamental task of image deblurring is to de-convolute the blurred/degraded image with
the PSF that exactly describes the distortion. Firstly, the original image is degraded using the
Degradation Model. It can be done by Gaussian Filter which is low-pass filter used to blur in image. This ringing effect should be removed before restoration using edge
trapping. After removing the ringing effect, blind Deconvolution algorithm is applied to the blurred
images. It is possible to renovate the original image without having specific knowledge of degradation
filter. Recent algorithms have afforded dramatic progress, yet
many aspects of the problem remain challenging and hard to understand."

Comment edited 1 minute after posting

1 upvote

image deblurring is not new.
i have visited a nice demo on siggraph 2006 that showed some (hand selected) images. the results where stunning.

but it did not work for all images and was far from being usefull for photographer. thought it is used now for astro photography and yields good results.

im sure we will see image deblurring in a future PS version.
maybe even in a 6.5 point update.
it will not work miracles... but it will work good for some images.

1 upvote

Where's the deblur feature? That's the only reason for which I'd like to try the beta version.

3 upvotes

In hell probably as it wont work much, unless you create perfectly gaussian type of blur. Only lens that can do that is 135mm f2.8 STF. :D

0 upvotes

that is obviously wrong... read some siggraph withepapers about image deblurring / removing blur introduced by camera shake.

adobe does not code this to remove IRIS BLUR from an image. it´s about CAMAERA SHAKE / MOTION BLUR.

i think you don´t even know what he is speaking about?

1 upvote

Adobe has its work cut out for them if they are going to convince me to update yet again. The "problem" is that CS5 is actually overkill for my needs. So many features... so little reason to use them. I only upgrade from CS3 to get 64 bit.

It's interesting that the features which cause the most "wow" (context-sensitive fill, etc) are the ones I have never touched, while on the other hand I'd really like to see improvements made to re-size (make it gamma aware and add advanced upsizing technologies), curves (make the dialog larger for better ease of use), and basically just further improvements to existing, commonly used tools.

Improve the pattern recognition for aligning layers prior to focus stacking, and I'll upgrade.

1 upvote

If I only want Camera RAW update to the level of $150 Lightroom,
I need to purchase full CS6 upgrade for $350.
Why can't you simply release Camera RAW as a separate
software for $49 or so and allow me to keep my CS5 I'm
perfectly happy with?

2 upvotes

Or just get LR4!

Comment edited 12 seconds after posting

0 upvotes

Where did you get the cs6 upgrade pricing from?

0 upvotes

I would buy ACR as separate program immediately!

I hate libraries so Lightroom is not good SW for me. I prefer freedom of editing pictures anywhere I choose and easiness of transfer settings from folder to folder, drive to drive, computer to computer...

0 upvotes

Get Capture One and use some decent enough (plugin compatibile) version of PS and forget about new version. As far as I know, everything since CS2 is more or less useless..

0 upvotes

Or turn on 'write changes into xmp or meta automatically' in Lightroom and have all your adjustments in acr and other raw-reading software anywhere, anyway.

3 upvotes

PS CS6 seems to offer little in inovation. Editing video is nice, but I bet Director Pro does a better job. Moving content aware is a new -and probably little used, feature. I am sure I will need ACR 7 as new cameras are introduced but it is a real shame I can't buy it as a seperate plug in. As for new user interface and icons, this will simply slow me down. Not real happy. So many real improvements left out. Maybe this is a "rush to judgement". We shall see.

1 upvote

Mescalamba: I know you commented snowboarder but let me add a different angle of view: I have already got Capture One 6 Pro. (I use Capture One since version 4.) Unfortunately it's output for my new Sony A77 is far behind Adobe Camera Raw output. In fact I would not hasitate to mark it as terrible. :-( And as I have seen right now ACR 7 beta is even better.

0 upvotes

I'm still on CS4. Can't beat Photoshop for dodging and burning layers.

But I don't like the library system type organisers, and store my downloads as dated folders. I like to see the small jpg images within the directory folder view. I haven't managed to make this happen in Bridge.

Has cs6 improved its folder views???

cheers Dave S ;)

But I love FastStone for it's organisational, renaming, simple basic editing. Has jpg's in the folder view.

0 upvotes

cool

0 upvotes

Total comments: 175