Adobe Photoshop CS5: Worldwide Launch

By Vlatko Juric-Kokic

You've simply got to love the Internet. I watched the worldwide CS5 launch on the Adobe website. Yes, it was basically a 45-minute long advertisement for Creative Suite (I wonder whether the presenters were all instructed to wear black), but it did show what Adobe considers pertinent new features of the programs. Of course, Photoshop is what should interest photographers the most.

Yeah, the content-aware fill is in Photoshop. You can erase awkward things from your photos. And the warp puppet is in, so you can adjust the pose of your models in post-processing. It was interesting to note that they presented the features in the part of the presentation for "designers." Adobe has either intentionally closed their eyes to the implications for photography or they really didn't think about them.

Speaking about photographic features, there's better HDR creation with quite a nifty ghosting removal. You know, when stuff moves between one exposure and another. Now you can—apparently easily—remove ghosts of moving tree branches or something similar. They also added faux-HDR creation from a single exposure without the need to develop the photo twice, and they added some HDR presets.

They added a more elaborate noise removal and vignetting control in Adobe Camera Raw, as well as an ability to add grain to the photos directly in ACR. Inside Photoshop itself, Lens Correction filter gets a database of cameras and lenses, as well as an ability to upload your own lens profiles online for others to use. (The filter features both distortion and chromatic aberration corrections.)

Finally, mini-Bridge might prove to be the most welcome workflow addition. It seems you don't need to run Bridge and Photoshop concurrently anymore, because the mini-Bridge works as a panel inside Photoshop and you can see RAW photos without switching between the programs.

You can find out more at Adobe.

All in all, it looks like a worthy upgrade. I can't wait to get my hands on it.

Vlatko

Send this post to a friend

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Dave Polaschek: "One thing that hasn't gotten much play yet about content-aware-fill is that it is a great tool for removing dust, hair, water spots, etc. from scanned negatives / photos. Much quicker for me than the healing brush ever was, and cool enough that I bought a tablet to use with it.

"Disclaimer: I'm part of the Photoshop team. I didn't work on that feature, but have had some time to play with it, and am convinced that it's finally time to go back and re-scan all those old family photographs since I can actually get them cleaned up for printing this time around."

Comments

[Patrick Dodds]

Well this is great news - and what I am particularly pleased about is having lashed out multiple hundreds of pounds sterling only a few weeks ago for CS4, blissfully unaware that this was on the horizon....

[Ken Tanaka]

[cynic]
How "awesome". Those baby and vacation snaps should look better than ever soon!
[/cynic]

[mwg]

Apparently there's no cross-platform licensing support for CS5. You can (legally) run it on two machines, but they'd better be the same platform. And God help you if you want to switch platforms.

This is in contrast to Lightroom, where you can run it on on a Mac and a Windows machine at the same time without jumping through any hoops.

There's no good technical reason why they can't do this in CS5, and it's one of my pet peeves that they haven't done it yet.

Does this mean I won't upgrade? I'll probably give it a try when they put out the trial editions.

[Flaneur (Albano Garcia)]

The content aware fill is also in photography section, not only in design.
Amazing the news for Lens Correction. I guess it means bye bye to PTLens...

[Miserere]

So will the lens correction work through ACR? That would be something...

[Poagao]

Perhaps this will finally put an end to all of those "great capture!" comments on Flickr.

[Jim Couch]

YAWN...

[Mike Jones]

Digital photography is now reaching an equivalency to those painters who specialised in paintings so realistic that they looked like photographs. That wasn’t art, and this is not photography.

[hugh crawford]

About cross-platform licensing support for CS5.
What I do is use my windows applications on a virtual machine when I need to use a Mac or Linux

I like Virtual Box from Sun, and it's free. VMware also makes some good solutions.

[Bahi]

From what I can tell of the upgrade prices, we'll be paying a 33% markup here in the UK over US prices to upgrade from CS4 to CS5 and that's ex-VAT/sales tax. Nice.

[wchen]

Amazingly danger weapon.
I want one to kill my photos.

[David]

I have CS2, I could make the same quality prints using Photoshop 6 or 7.

I don't care about electrical wires.

p.s. There is a whole lotta lovin' going on in the flat above me right now, there is no way i could photoshop it away. Get a room!!

..i mean, in a different building.

[Eli Burakian]

I guess now with this "content aware" feature photoshop (no capitals) can legitimately be used as a verb.

[Kurt Shoens]

I'm particularly interested in the lens correction, although I do wish they'd put it in Adobe Camera Raw which (I suppose) would make it more likely to show up in Lightroom. I've found automatic lens correction to be quite useful, especially for photographs taken in bulk.

As for Photoshop removing the art from photography, not in the capable and restrained hands of anyone here, I'm sure.

In any event, not all photography is art. Much of it is simply utilitarian, also known as useful.

[James McDermott]

I've just seen the price. Tell Mike Johnston he can forget about a new car

[Ken Tanaka]

My earlier cynical remark was in earnest. But I cannot, in honesty, deny that this looks like one hell of a development surge for Photoshop. The technical achievements represented by some of these features can spin the mind and are certainly laudable.

Blaming tools for poor carpentry is wrong-minded and a waste of time. TV woodworkers have long used hundred thousand dollar workshop (sets) to grind out some of the ugliest, most nauseatingly tasteless, sentimental garbage for decades. Shrug.

Better to take the view of how much stronger a better tool will make an imaginative talent.

[erlik]

Flaneur, the main stress on content-aware fill was in designer section, though.

Miserere, no, Lens Correction is still where it has been - under the Filter menu inside Photoshop. Although, IIRC without looking, it's got its own menu item and is not under Distort anymore.

Ken, yes, they seem to have advanced the underlying "intelligence" quite a lot. I forgot last night, they also changed selections. It looks like you can much more easily select stuff like windblown hair and leaves.

As to "Goodbye PTLens", it was always the case with Photoshop. There was a plugin for something and then the next version of Photoshop would bring the ability right into the program.

Frex, I don't think that this selection stuff will kill Vertus Fluid Mask (the best masking plugin I've seen), but it's certainly a step in that direction. In the same vein, I don't think that the ability to add grain will kill Real Grain or BW Styler, but it's certainly now easier to work without them.

[Ed Buziak]

I made better images when I had to play shadow games with my hands and bits of card and wire in my ancient darkroom... and often did it faster too!

[Andy Marfia]

I'm excited about the new Lens Correction feature. I use DXO labs Optics Pro to correct distortion-- an excellent program with modules available for a staggering number of lenses. The only downside is that it's a standalone program, so using it kind of screws up my workflow (it essentially replaces Camera Raw). If I can get the same results out of Photoshop, that would be a preferred solution.

[ctein]

Dear Kurt,

ACR is already lens savvy when it comes to distortion, so I think one has reason to hope the new version will be both distortion and chromatic aberration savvy. I'm certainly hoping so-- 'twould save me a lot of time!

~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear mwg & others,

Adobe may have changed the rules for CS5, but they've allowed you to cross between platforms for some time for essentially the cost of a new set of disks. They don't shout this from the rooftops, but call their customer support toll-free line and tell them you want to migrate from PC to Mac (or vice versa), and it ought to be relatively painless.

Running on both platforms at the same time with one license? Not so far as I know.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PC users are already there, but Mac users may finally rejoice in 64-bit memory management. If you work on large files and your machine can accept more than 4 GB of RAM, you are gonna be one happy camper.

For that matter, more of the internal code has been recoded for 64-bit data paths, so it's going to be noticeably peppier on either platform in some operations.

Dunno if it's more multi-core capable or not. Also don't know if saving multi-layered PSDs got improved (which is appallingly sluggish in CS4).

pax / Ctein

[JackM]

The 64bit on a Mac is what I have been waiting for. Of course that means a computer upgrade is in order too. So the $199 upgrade cost for the software is just the small part of the total upgrade cost. Still cheaper than the 599.

[Brian Mosley]

I'm impressed by the technology, not tempted to join the Adobe Rental Bloatware Scheme though.

Thanks for the heads-up Mike - I'll stick with Lightzone for my photography post processing - a much, much more rewarding and affordable option :)

Cheers

Brian

[Antony Shepherd]

I wonder if one of the new HDR presets is 'Tasteful' or 'Natural-looking' - as the majority of the HDR shots I've seen are anything but!

[Greg Nuspel]

It's interesting that on YouTube they show how the Puppet Warp is useful to photographers, but not at the release.

[Andreas]

Funniest comment of 2010 so far by David:
"I have CS2, I could make the same quality prints using Photoshop 6 or 7.

I don't care about electrical wires.
p.s. There is a whole lotta lovin' going on in the flat above me right now, there is no way i could photoshop it away. Get a room!!

..i mean, in a different building."

The announcment itself also made me yawn.

[Roland]

@ Bahi: There is no reason to buy in the UK. Order from the US, you will pay UK VAT but at the bottom line you will be better off. Not to mention you will feel good about showing Adobe's price policy the finger.

Adobe always tries to justify the prices for the European market with translation costs. As you probably know, the product they sell in the UK is identical to the US version: "color" has not been substituted by "colour".

[Steph Mineart]

I' certainly going to upgrade, but I dunno. I've always had content aware fill. It's called my brain - I use it before I snap the picture. Don't get me wrong; I do love to draw and paint in Photoshop - I have to do it all day long for my job. But if that's all I wanted to do, I'd do it at work. I'd prefer my photography be things I see in reality, not stuff I made up in my head. I know everyone draws that line in a different spot about what they're comfortable with, which is cool. That's just where I prefer to draw it.

[Michael Martin-Morgan]

Said it before and here we are again:

I won't bore everybody with the figures - those who want to can just try visiting their respective Adobe sites and check the corresponding rip-offs concerning ALL PRODUCTS, against the US site - I'll just say that I've been grilling Adobe over this for some 5 years now and they've not bothered to do anything about it. I've told them time and again that their stupidity foments illegal downloading of their products to such an extent that I bet if Photoshop cost just a hundred dollars and everybody in the world who uses it had paid for it they'd be making more of a profit.
Only conclusion: they're great software artists but complete idiots when it comes to selling the stuff.

[mwg]

Ctein, I have actually gone through the process of switching platforms. It worked, but it took several weeks and numerous phone calls to Adobe support. Let's just say I was not happy.

Like I said, there is absolutely no good technical reason for customers to have to go through this, especially when it is absolutely not at all necessary for one of their other products (Lightroom).

I can't imagine there are any other good reasons for this. It costs their support team money to keep me on the phone for so long, at an absolute minimum.

[Eric Steinberg]

A tip of the hat to Ken. I really don't understand the all snarky comments. Don't kick the tool because you don't find a use for it. If you have ever tried some serious restoration I think you would welcome content aware fill. I've seen some pretty nice HDR, if done tastfully it can be the only way to reproduce a high contrast scene as the eye first saw it. Instead of the truncated vision provided by the dynamic range of a given sensor or emulsion. But who am I, I bought one of those cameras with "art filters" Have never used em, bet I never will.

[Adrian]

Yeah, they got that money-from-my-pocket-removal feature nailed down for years :-)

[ctein]

Dear mwg,

I'm sorry to hear that you had trouble switching; two people I know did it in a matter of a few minutes with no grief from Adobe. Apparently the experience is highly variable.

Your first paragraph gave the impression you were entirely unaware the option existed. Most people are, which is why I responded as I did.

As for why some products and not others are automatically cross-licensed? Shrug. You could ask that of any publisher. As Tevye said, "It's a mystery."

pax / Ctein