Early Review of Photoshop CS6

ByMike Moffit

A few weeks ago, Adobe announced a beta release of their up-and-coming version of Photoshop CS6. This comes as little surprise to most since Adobe is constantly coming out with something new; however, I have been looking into some of the new features in depth with this latest release, and I am impressed.

To start, there has been a revival of the technique known as Tilt-Shift in the photography world. For those who don’t know what this is, it is the process of making a real life image appear like it is a modeled miniature by using a special lens to blur the top and bottom of an image.

Lately, artists have been using technology in lieu of a lens to create these images. Adobe has catered to this rebirth by adding a few new types of blur techniques, one of which will give you the look and feel of a tilt-shifted photograph. Now, instead of saving your pennies on that fancy lens for your camera, you can achieve the same effect with a few clicks.

The next feature that completely blew my mind was the Content Aware move tool. I am pretty sure that Adobe has started employing more magicians than engineers because this tool works like magic. It gives you the ability to select an area on your flattened image and then move that selection.

In previous versions of Photoshop, you would be left with an area of background color where the selection used to be. Well, not anymore! Now, the spot where your selection used to be will be filled with content that very accurately resembles the selection’s surroundings.

Of course, these are just two of the numerous features Adobe is rolling out with their new version of Photoshop. I think many more will be testing out this beta version for the next few months until the final release hits the shelves.

To those who might want to hold off on purchasing Photoshop knowing that a newer version is on the horizon, I say go ahead and buy CS5.5—Adobe has said that they will be offering a free upgrade to CS6 for any customers who purchase CS5.5 between March 26th and May 6th, 2012.

Lastly, if you would like to participate in this beta you can download a trial here. You can read more about the additional features Adobe Photoshop CS6 here.

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