New Features in Photoshop CS5

Adobe Launches All New Creative Suite 5

Today is an amazing day. Adobe Systems has officially launched the brand new Creative Suite 5(CS5). As a graphic designer and web developer a brand new Adobe Creative Suite means a whole new set of tools to make life easier and offer more possibilities. For those of you who don't know Adobe CS5 is a collection of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications created by Adobe Systems. Each collection in the Creative Suite consists of Adobe's ever popular applications, including Photoshop CS5, InDesign CS5, Illustrator CS5, Acrobat, Flash CS5 and more. Without these applications technologies like PDF, PostScript and Flash wouldn't be as readily available as they are today.

While I still don't know all of the new features created for CS5, the features I have checked out are very impressive. I'm going to focus the rest of this blog post on some of the exciting new features available for Photoshop CS5. Photoshop is easily my favourite application in the Creative Suite. It was the first Adobe product I ever started working with and has come a long way since the days of Photoshop 5(before there were 'Creative Suites'). If you aren't aware of what Adobe Photoshop is, it's the leading application and industry standard for graphic designers across the world. It gives its users the tools to paint, design, and draw almost anything imaginable on a digital canvas. With that quick definition out of the way, let's skip to the good stuff and go over some of the new features of Photoshop CS5.

I'm going to introduce my top three 'known' features for Photoshop CS5. I've scoured YouTube for some videos to help show off these features, so be sure to watch them as they are truly exciting and powerful tools:

1. Puppet Warp

Puppet warp is a brand new tool designed to accurately warp images with exact precision. This feature is difficult to describe, but to try and sum it all up the tool basically gives you the ability to place anchor points on an object and manipulate it based on those points.

2. Complex Selections Made Easy

Adobe has added brand new selection options that make it incredibly simple to cut out or mask intricate image elements. This amazing tool basically makes selecting hair a non-issue. I thought this day would never come! Along with this great new feature is the ability to eliminate background color from around the selection edges and make perfect masks by utilizing the new refinement tools.

3. Content-Aware Fill

Content-Aware Fill (aka PatchMatch) is by far my top favourite new feature in Photoshop CS5. This is an amazing tool that will blur the lines between pro and amateur photo editors. Content-Aware Fill is an intelligent fill. It will allow you to easily fill in gaps of an image, and completely change structures to fit your desired size and shape. A formal definition for the Content-Aware Fill is "A randomized correspondence algorithm for structural image editing." It really looks like magic when you watch it work. Check out the video below to see an example of it in work.

Well this about sums up my introduction to some of the awesome new tools and features available in Photoshop CS5. There's plenty more cool features though, so be sure to check them out on Adobe's website.

Thanks!