Photoshop CS5 gets reviewed in detail, has lots to offer

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Photoshop CS5 gets reviewed in detail, has lots to offer

Photoshop turned twenty years old this year. That may seem like nothin' but a number, but when you look at the Mac platforms it's migrated to and from, and the fact that it's had 12 versions, Photoshop's twenty years have seen a lot of changes for one application. From System 6 on the Motorola 68000, it was then ported to PowerPC, then to OS X, then to OS X Intel, and now to Cocoa and 64-bit. All this while adding the features that make it the meaty image editor it is today. One look at the laundry list of major additions in CS5 makes it clear that Adobe isn't anywhere near done with the product. The new feature list is unrelenting:

  • Wet media brushes
  • Content-aware fill and heal tools
  • Improved masking/chroma keying
  • Camera RAW 6
  • Puppet Warp
  • Mini Bridge
  • Data-based lens distortion correction with custom lens profiling application
  • Local adaptation tone-mapping
  • Faster realtime 3D engine
  • Repoussé 3D features and HDR image-based lighting
  • New floating color picker and eyedropper
Of course, all of these features also appear in the Windows version, which has had 32- and 64-bit flavors since version CS4. Let's not forget that Windows 7 just came out, as well, so Adobe's had its work cut out for it with this latest installment. I've been working with the betas and the release for a while now, so let's see how it all worked out.

Test Hardware



  • Mac Pro dual quad-core Nehalem Xeon 2.66 GHz
    • 24GB RAM
    • 120GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD system drive with separate HD RAID scratch disk
    • Geforce GTX 285 / Radeon 4870 test scenarios
    • Dual NEC WUXi 2490 Spectraview monitors
    • OS X 10.6.3 running 64-bit kernel

  • MacBook Pro Core2 Duo 2.4GHz 15" Santa Rosa
    • 4GB RAM
    • 120GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD
    • NVIDIA Geforce 8600M 256MB
    • OS X 10.6.3 running 32-bit kernel
System Requirements


  • Windows
    • Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor
    • Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 3; Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (Service Pack 2 recommended); or Windows 7
    • 1GB of RAM
    • 1GB of available hard-disk space
    • 1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM
    • DVD-ROM drive
    • QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for multimedia features
    • Broadband Internet connection required for online services

  • Mac OS
    • Multicore Intel processor
    • Mac OS X v10.5.7 or v10.6
    • 1GB of RAM
    • 2GB of available hard-disk space for installation
    • OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM
    • DVD-ROM drive
    • QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for multimedia features
    • Broadband Internet connection required for online services*
Updated Tools and Adjustments

As I mentioned above, CS5 is loaded with new features, but there are some significant tweaks to the existing toolset to cover first. One small thing that a lot of people will appreciate is that you can now drag and drop smart objects into images directly. It's a handy little addition, especially if you are working between Illustrator and Photoshop, where you want to keep vector images as smart objects.


dragdropcs5-1.png



Hue Strip and Sampling Ring


With the new painting tools in CS5 came the need for quicker, interactive color adjustments and a better color sampler. The first of these additions is the Sampling Ring that's been added to the eyedropper. When you click a color with the eyedropper tool, a circular thing pops up that looks a bit like the manual focus ring on a camera:


samplingring-1.jpg


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Ars reviews Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended :an
 
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