Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta (available as a free download) has features that should please photographers.
Layers can now be filtered by Kind, Name, Effect, Mode, Attribute and Color to speed up workflow. If you take lots of portraits, you can now easily select skin tones, though we wonder what skin color it is defaulting to.
A new blur gallery allows you to interactively blur the background using Field, Iris or Tilt-Shift blur. Iris blur allows you to select a circular (or oval shaped) portion of the picture to stay sharp while blurring the rest. It even allows you to specify different parts of the picture to stay sharp with the rest blurred. Tilt-Shift blur allows you to create gradual blur vertically or horizontally with a “bokeh” effect added. Field blur allows you to apply blur across the whole picture. All the blur tools are interactive so that you can see the changes immediately as you change settings.
With the Content-Aware Move tool, you simply select an object, drag and move it to another part of the picture. The empty space that is created (where it used to be) is “magically” filled in. It’s not perfect since it will duplicate what’s around, including clearly defined objects such as trees, posts, etc. Similarly, an Extend option allows you to extend an object to make it longer, but its usefulness again depends on how clean your background is. Content-Aware Patch allows you to specify from where in your picture you want to take a sample to draw over an object (effectively removing the object).
Crop now allows you to rotate the picture while you are cropping it, as well as preserve the pixels so you can recover the cropped part if you so desire later (like in MS Word crop).
If you “Allow Tool Recording,” you can easily record your creative process. It’s great for those who write tutorials because your actions are recorded and can be played back to display your creative process at work.
Now, digitally manipulating your photos are easier than ever! Don’t ever believe any pictures you see from now on. Unless the industry incorporates in a new tamper-proof meta data that the image is original or has been digitally manipulated, images should not be admissible in the courtroom anymore. But judges know that already, right?
Download the Photoshop CS6 Beta free at: Adobe.
