COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
Adobe Photoshop is the most popular industry standard graphics designing and image editing software. Photoshop CS6 is a major release with a restructured interface, several new features and enhancements that enables to do work faster and efficient.
Photoshop CS6 offers several advanced features, such as the ability to edit vectors the same way as in Adobe Illustrator, improved layer management, and the ability to save in the background and auto recovery.
New features of Photoshop CS6:
The new dark user interface:
Dark user interface is the most prominent feature in Photoshop CS6. This interface helps images in the canvas stand out against the dark background, so that designers can focus more on the image. Four different color themes in Preferences dialog box to change look and feel of interface.
Auto recovery and save in Background options:
It enables Photoshop to save documents automatically. It protects from any kind of software crash by recovering the file, on which the designer working on, automatically. Designer can set photoshop cs6 to save recovery information at specified intervals.
Content-Aware features:
Content Aware features allows designer to recompose and blend image selections quickly. In addition to Content-Aware Move Tool, Photoshop CS6 updates the existing Patch Tool with the Content-Aware option. It enables to replace undesired image elements by blending surrounding content smoothly.
New Crop Tool:
This crop tool allows designer to crop images interactively. On selecting Crop Tool, the interactive preview feature is activated, which enables designer to visualize the results in a better way. Crop Tool has two options, Straighten and aspect ratio. The Straighten option straightens an image by drawing a line on it. Designer can access the current aspect ratio or resolution by right-clicking the image.
Drawing Improvements:
Photoshop CS6 provides additional options like Fill, Stroke, stroke width, and stroke type for the line and shape tools. Strokes and fills using the Options bar enables to create fully vector-based objects in Photoshop. In addition, designer can stroke objects with different dashed lines options and fill objects with preset or user-defined gradients, colors, and patterns.
The Adaptive Wide Angle filter:
The new adaptive wide angle filter corrects lens distrotions that appear when shot taken using a wide-angle lenses. Lens distortion makes objects appear curved in panoramas. This filter fixes distortion or perspective issues in image automatically by considering the physical characteristics of individual lenses.
Improved auto corrections:
It allows to quickly enhance images using improved auto feature for Curves, Levels, and Brightness/Contrast. These options provide a better starting point for making adjustments in images.
Blur Gallery:
It enables to create photographic blur effects. The new blur filter uses a simple new interface with on-image controls. That means if we make any blur effect, it appears on the image. When apply these new blur effects, it preview all blur actions live with the Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine and a modern graphics card. However, Photoshop automatically switches to Central Processing Unit (CPU) mode for older systems.
Mercury Graphics Engine:
Mercury Graphics Engine provides real-time result while working with memory intensive tools like Liquify and Puppet Warp. It provides faster rendering while working with 3D and allows to paint more freely, and smoothly resize brush and brush tips in real-time. The Mercury Graphics Engine takes advantage of your computer’s Graphics Processing Unit(GPU) and video graphics card to speed up Photoshop’s performance.
Increased maximum brush sizes:
Photoshop CS6 allows to paint with brush sizes up to 5000 pixels.
Erodible brushes:
Draws realistic brush strokes using drawing tips that gradually wear away. We can create a wider variety of strokes while painting with a static tip by using the new Brush Projection option. We can save brush setting as presets.
New Character and Paragraph Styles:
This feature allows to create styles and save favorite styles in one place, and reuse them. Use paragraph styles to effectively manipulate text by creating a set of properties for each style.
The Properties panel: