IMPROVED IMAGES

After much trailing of new features across the blogosphere in recent weeks, the mothership has reached close earth orbit (if not actually landed) in the shape of the latest incarnation of the industry leading CS suite of software from Adobe. The glossy official introduction can be seen at http://cs5launch.adobe.com/. The word ‘launch’ is appropriate as the latest imaging goodness is not actually available to pick up from your retailer of choice just yet. You can however  pre-order online. The UK store indicates a mid-May shipping date with free delivery available up to 12th May.

As usual, Adobe offers a plethora of upgade routes with the putative savings increasing the larger the suite you purchase.

Courtesy Adobe

There is an interesting error in the store. In one part of the store if you click on the Photoshop Extended version the store will add in the standard version and charge you accordingly. Don’t get overexcited because you are not actually getting a discount. To avoid this problem, check the box image displayed by the store to see if you are getting what you want. The extended version is largely deep blue as opposed to the predominant white of the standard version. I suspect this will be remedied very shortly before misled customers actually receive the standard version instead of the extended version. Not a massive issue perhaps but strange that it got through. Maybe there are just too many options even for Adobe?

This latest upgrade of the CS suite has been a truly massive enterprise with every element of the extensive and rapidly burgeoning suite of programs getting a major facelift. In addition, completely new functionality has been added to take the end user even further from the details of actual code.

What then do the Adoberati get for their hard earned mullah? Happily it looks as though this odd numbered upgrade will be of sufficient interest to get those who baulked at the CS4 version to pony up. Looking at the main focus of this blog, namely Photoshop and its variants, the list of improvements is very extensive.

There has been much oohing and aahing over the additional intelligence to be found in the elite Content Aware Fill option, with Photoshop now providing an amazing ability to extrapolate images into blank areas and behind cropped parts of the image. While the first samples shown on the web look very impressive, repetition of some larger elements in the background can clearly be seen in some areas. This however should be amenable to remedy with some cloning. Significant time saving is still likely using the tool.

Speed improvements are indicated from a number of changes, including the use of cross platform 64bit processing support (especially as the MAC version of CS4 did not have it at all), new GPU accelerated features and a range of user suggested productivity improvements such as the ability to save 16 bit Photoshop format images as 8 bit Jpegs in a single step and a straighten button on the ruler tool options bar.

Camera Raw has received an upgrade to version 6 and a raft of improvements of the incremental rather than revolutionary kind. Noise removal, sharpening and vignetting, to mention just a few, have all been improved significantly. HDR has been upgraded to HDR Pro with greater user control and ability to generate HDR effects from single images.

Additional online services are available through CS Online such as CS Review (where work can be reviewed online with colleagues). Adobe states that these services will be complimentary for a limited time, without specifying what that time is. (There are no indications yet as to what the possible charges for this service might be or whether early adopters will be able to carry on using the service free.) I guess the time to charging will shorten in direct proportion to the service’s popularity. You take your pick and the risk of waiting.

Adobe has extended the UI customisation options yet again. You can massage the interface into your own image in many additional ways with an Adobe Labs tool, the Configurator 2 panel utility. With this you can even add in video tutorials and email to your customised panels. But does it allow you to order pizza?

Image manipulation has taken many steps forward with the Puppet Warp adding an interesting and potentially very useful addition to the armoury of those wishing to bring some life to their images. Automated lens correction will definitely speed up image editing with vignetting, chromatic aberration and lens distortion options available. If the specific lens/camera combination does not ship with the software, online searching will be available.

For all the 3D tech heads amongst you, Photoshop Extended also gets many improvements to provided additional 3D functionality. Better rendering performance is promised with an upgraded ART(Adobe Ray Tracer) 2 engine. Additional materials ship with the programme and more may be located online.

Bridge gets the workover with a mini Bridge panel available  in Photoshop, easy batch conversion to Jpeg, flexible batch renaming and faster navigation between open folders, amongst other improvements.

All in all Photoshop has moved on significantly. Field testing will sort the wheat from the chaff but this first look at the detailed specs suggests that CS3 and CS4 users will find spending their spondulicks on this upgrade almost irresistible.