I’m delighted to announce that a preview release of Photoshop CS6 is available for download from Adobe Labs. New awesomeness:
Blazingly fast performance and a modern UI — Experience unprecedented performance with the Mercury Graphics Engine, which gives you near-instant results when you edit with key tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, and Crop. Plus, a refined, fresh, and elegant Photoshop interface features dark background options that make your images pop.
New and re-engineered design tools — Create superior designs fast. Get consistent formatting with type styles, create and apply custom strokes and dashed lines to shapes, quickly search layers, and much more.
Content-Aware Patch — Patch images with greater control using the newest member of the Content-Aware family of technologies. Choose the sample area you want to use to create your patch, and then watch Content-Aware Patch magically blend pixels for a stunning result.
Here Russell Brown shows off his six favorite features (Camera Raw enhancements, wide-angle image correction, Blur Gallery, and more):
And here Julieanne Kost shows off her six favorite features, including type styles (!), vector layers with real stroke & fill (!!), video editing, and more:
There’s much more info to come, and I look forward to zeroing in on the Web & app design features especially. In the meantime, go grab yourself a copy, and check out the user forum to ask the team questions & share your feedback.
Whatever happened to Adobe subscription changes? (The cheaper prices and was an upgrade policy to things like Photoshop CS6 ever drafted?)
The new features look amazing, can’t wait to get my hands on this (going to grab a copy now)
That black cat creeps me out.
Rosvna, here it is a public beta of the software in itself. The pricing and subscription schemes are not usually discussed until the official announcement of the new version of the sofware.
Are there any news about Fireworks?
I’ve already seen at least one digital artist praise the improvements to painting tools. Is this a feature of Photoshop you intend to bolster going forward?
Will Illustrator CS6 take advantage of the same improvements and re-engineering work done in Photoshop CS6?
just when you thought it couldn’t get any worst!
If your going to change the colour of the UI re draw the icons to work with the new colour, don’t just invert them, it’s lazy and looks awful. Added to this now when photoshop is open but has no open document we have a big black window in the way of everything, thanks for that. PS UI has been awful for years, I was desperately hoping CS6 would set us on a better path.
Please tell me there is away to ditch the canvass thing.
Saying that there are some useful new features
Auto recovery – thank you
Liquify is now usable – handy
Wrap tool now revels the image behind – interesting, although i still wish we had more control of the points.
The new blur tools are a nice edition
Overall for a quick play it seems there are quite a few nice little editions. I have no idea why iMovie has been build in, or why they are persisting with the very rudimentary 3D tools. I’d happily pay extra for adobe to start to focus rather than trying to make PS a jack of all trades and master of none.
You can turn off the application frame by selecting Window>Application Frame. The icons are not simply inverted. Each UI stop was carefully crafted. You can set the lightness of the UI you want under Preferences>Interface…
I agree with you on the interface thing
i am having a real hard time with the layers, there doesn’t seem to be any differentiation between different types of layers, at a glance they all look the same so when i have a hundred layers i cant really see whats going on.
i dont see what everyone is so excited about.
aside for the text styles. the rest i have plug ins for
oh well.
so for now ill go back to cs5.
Hate adobe FLEX/FLASH into custom panels.
I want use native tools (obj-c, Xcode,etc) to access to native GUI controls.
Sure – we’ve also talked about script UI for laying out native controls. That’s probably more accessible to mortals.
agreed the options to change the ui look butt ugly as was stated its only an inversion and besides being just a lazy inversion looks absolutely horrid. I understand you wanna have the option to few images against a dark bg for better viewing ala LR but it doesn’t work here in the ps ui the tools look too dark and they don’t contrast well and are hard to see PLEASE FIX THIS PRIOR TO RELEASE find a better way to show the tools and interface in regards to the black color
Panels suck you only allow like 10 panels at a time open; remove the damn limit if you want panels to catch on like plugins. PS already has its panels (extensions) which knocks down the amount of 3rd party ones you can have open. Unlike plugins you guys are crippling it before it catches on. Remember when ps could only have a certain amount of plugins ps could load at a given time; the rest didn’t appear in the filters menu?
Agreed too much trying to please everyone with video and 3d; though i do understand that alot of ps users do use it for video and 3d so not surprised they kinda veered away from pure 2d image editing. Come back to getting more photography and web design tools as ps has lost track of its origins and then maybe more users will come back
Just watched the video, and first I love Julieanne videos, she talk fast and intelligible and she answer the questions before they even come up. She does the best tutorial videos (love her LR4 vids as well)
Adobe Photoshop CS6 just looks amazing. I am amazed how the Photoshop team keep innovating on such a mature product. Most mature product (web or desktop) flatten out after a while, the innovators move on, and the team cannot get the innovative energy back. But the CS Creative suite, especially photoshop, is exactly the opposite, they keep adding adding and adding better and smarter stuff.
The text stuff is amazing, and it is going to make my mockup work much easier.
I am so glad having I invested time to learn Photoshop (even if I am a “developer”), best investment ever. I use it for my family photo hobby, for my Application design work, and for any pixel work I need (for doc or anything else). Even for casual graphics, cnce you get familiar with it, it can ever been faster than Powerpoint and the nice thing is that there is no ceiling.
Anyway, I will wait the master suite to get all these new goodies.
The only thing that seem off, is the video thing. I am a big fan of After Effect as well, and I am not sure how/why I would use the Photoshop functionality, but it probably make sense for some other users.
Keep up the good work, I am a software guy, and I regard the Photoshop team (and other CS team) as the reference of software development as far as innovation and execution.
On behalf of the Photoshop team, we’re extremely excited to share what we’ve been working so hard on. CS6 represents 62% more feature changes than CS5 (and that was a big one) and nearly twice as many JDI features. There are some huge changes around the interface too (they run much deeper than the color) – if the tone isn’t to your liking, its easily changed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIf9KljT68&list=PL1C15DAB68A34A0D5&index=1&feature=plpp_video
For a great overview, I highly recommend you check out the NAPP resource here: http://www.photoshopuser.com/cs6
For constructive feedback, there’s no better place than the forums where you pull down the beta (special thanks to Cari Gushiken and Jeff Tranberry who are living there).
Thanks so much and we hope you enjoy,
-Bryan, Stephen, Zorana and Pam (your friendly neighborhood Photoshop Product Managers)
yes we realize the color can be changed back in options thats not the problem; it looks like you took the ugly dark option from elements and put it in ps; simply inverting the colors doesn’t make it any better. Please fix is so it doesn’t look so butt ugly and nasty and make a proper dark variation ui as an option. it looks ugly and the grey tools do not contrast well against the very dark background.
The designer simply inverted it and it looks lazy not to mention horrid and its like you have an option thats there but its there mainly for show
Please fix it so it actually looks like a professional ui and not just an inverted swap expecting it to look good. My eyes hurt when using it. PS is a professional product so please put more attention to fixing this. Yes its maybe a minor part of ps but its the interface along with the tools that make Photoshop what it is.
It’s not true that the designer(s) simply inverted the colors. There are two complete sets of icons. The dark ones aren’t just the light ones inverted.
you know the high contrast theme control panel/personalization settings in windows that look like a color blind chipmunk made that nobody uses?; yeah they look like that. an inverted negative of the normal interface. Nobody uses them unless they have issues with vision.
Transplanting it from elements and plucking it into ps’s nice settings and deciding to make it an option. Please do something about this as photoshop is a tool alot of users use regularly and paying attention to keeping the ui clean and professional should be priority #1 as its why people use ps in the first place. Its not a minor issue and this black variation is hard to work seriously in. Take a poll if you have to and see how many people think it should be reworked
8bf,
I’d encourage you to post your thoughts where the team spends time and these things can be weighed productively, in context
[You’re assuming that he (?) wants to be productive. 😉 But yes, absolutely agreed. Light a candle, don’t just curse the darkness (literally or figuratively). –J.]
– please visit us at:
http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/photoshopcs6/
I’m bhughes@adobe.com
Thanks for your thoughts,
-Bryan
I LOVE the new black and grey UI options that are now available actually. Much better than the fixed one that CS5 had.
I was hoping, and can now appreciate that Adobe has taken PS CS6 into the direction of the UI seen in their video apps and Lightroom. Good choice in my opinion. The new consistency will feel good. Thanks guys for the effort on everything else too!
Did Ms. Kost spelled “Blog Category” intently as “Blog Catigory”? Look at the clip again where she explained her six, favorite Cs6 features.
🙂
I cant wait to get my hands on CS6! The new interface looks awesome! Adobe is always impressing me with its updates. I love how each program sinks up with each other. Especially premiere, photoshop and after effects. Makes my life so easy for video and photography!
Any speed ups to such basics as Open/Save, even in 8-bit mode? Better memory management? I know these “features” are not sexy, but necessary.
Yup – try it for yourself. Background saving is a real winner!
Will it work with XP like Lightroom 4 won’t?
[Yes, though some of the new GPU-powered features won’t work there. Retrofitting new stuff for decade-old graphics tech just isn’t viable. –J.]
How much will the CS6 upgrade from CS5 cost when available…I am loving the beta.
I’m glad of inclusion of video. While I use a competitors NLE, I use bridge as my “management tool” and the ability to do quick edits in Photoshop will be very handy.
Is there a pulldown for 24P in this tool?