I’ve gotten the new Photoshop CS6 public beta (only the second time in 20 years Adobe had released a free version of Photoshop) and played with it a bit (get it here). Here’s some quick, early thoughts.
The Look
I’m sure it’ll be one of those things hard-core PS fanboys (and trust me, there are such creatures) will either complain about or just “meh”, but I like the new look. Gives it more of a Lightroom feel. And I always thought Lightroom was set apart a bit too much, even though it isn’t sold with the Creative Suite. I think the dark will let your eye find the image you are working on easier.
Saving your Work
Auto Save and Background Save? Oh man, gimme, gimme, gimme! On of the features I LOVE most about InDesign is recovering a file if, gasp, InDesign crashes. For ages, I’ve wondered aloud (especially if I know someone was listening) why, why, WHY, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign didn’t have features (and the same shortcuts, don’t get me started) across all of them. Well, the Auto Save is a great step in that direction. Even though Photoshop is the one of those that crashes on me the least, it’s an awesome feature. It defaults to saving every 10 minutes and you can change that a bit, but crashing and losing 10 minutes of work as opposed to an hour or two is great (yes, I know, I could save the file myself more often, but come on, how many of you really do that?). Background Save is one of those “duh, why didn’t I think of that ages ago” things. When you go to save your 2GB file, you can now switch to another tab and start working as opposed to going out for coffee and a donut. Not only is it more efficient, but your waistline with thank you too.
Content-Aware Move
This one is pretty cool. Content Aware Fill was a great induction into the Photoshop pantheon of tools. Sometimes it gives you some weird results, but it’s a huge time saver. Well, the Adobe-folk have taken it one step further and made Content Aware Move. Instead of taking, say, a car and selecting it, moving it, then cloning out the original, now you can just move it and Content Aware will fill in the space where the original was. I’m sure that the results will be varied as before, but again, its a big, time-saving step.
Okay, that’s it for now. I’ve got a bunch of catching up to do (I didn’t get an advanced copy like some other reviewers) and I’ll let you know some of the other new features once I dig through and find them.
