Brooklyn Museum

A quick shot of the Brooklyn Museum just after dusk.

My 10 Favorite New Features of Photoshop CS6

So Adobe’s been teasing it with the many sneaks they’ve been releasing over the past several months, and it’s finally here - the public beta of Photoshop CS6, code-named Superstition. It’s like some kind of design geek Christmas. Before you run off to download the beta, though, I thought I’d take this opportunity to list, in no particular order, some of my top ten favorite new features. 

Dark UI

Photoshop’s new dark UI is designed to match with other pro level appsLike me, some of you will love it, but I can already hear the moans of anguish from those of you who will 

fire up the new Photoshop and be appalled at the new dark interface. First of all, relax. You can switch back to the grey interface you know and love. In fact, there are four different UI color options in the interface preferences. 

The Interface preferences give you four choices of colors, as well as custom options for Photoshop’s three screen modes

Second, there are reasons for the dark UI, including knocking the application’s interface back so that it’s not competing with the amazing content you’re creating. Also, it makes Photoshop consistent with the other apps in the Creative Suite (and other pro-level apps in general - think Final Cut, Aperture, Lightroom, etc).

Finally, the UI update is far more than skin deep. The good people at Adobe have gone in and redone every single one of the thousands of radio buttons, icons, sliders and other elements to make them all uniform, consistent and pixel-perfect. It’s a big deal. 

Layer Search

The Layers Panel can be searched by layer name or typeHoly smokes. If you’ve ever opened up a Photoshop document and gazed in despair at a Layers panel full of “layer 2 copy 2 copy”, then this feature needs no explanation. You can not only search for a layer by name, you can filter the list by layer type (pixels, text, adjustment, vector and smart object). Once you see it in action, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without it.

Auto-Save

Yay! Crashes happen, but there’s nothing like hitting that “reopen” button after dismissing that damn crash report, and seeing your document pop right back up like nothing ever happened. It’s so good that you might start to secretly hope Photoshop crashes.

Blur Gallery

On-canvas editing is big in the new version of Photoshop, as seen here in the Iris Blur tool.Nowadays, everyone is doing all sorts of tilt-shift and selective focus trickery with their smartphones. You didn’t think that Adobe, the predominant imaging software makers, we’re going to sit back and not get in the game, did you? Not that there weren’t already ways of achieving these effects in Photoshop, but three new dedicated tools have been added to the Blur menu to give you these effects with pro-quality results. Field Blur blurs the entire image, Iris Blur creates an oval or rounded blur region, and Tilt Shift creates that miniature effect we’re all so familiar with now. Each of these tools has super-fast and responsive on-canvas editing tools that let you edit the effect without having to go off and fiddle with numbers in a dialog box.

Character and Paragraph Styles

Here’s another one that doesn’t need much explanation. Editing more than a handful of text in Photoshop has, until now, been sort of a pain in the rear. Now, like in most programs that involve any sort of text editing, you can create and edit styles and apply those changes to blocks of text throughout your document. Awesome. 

Vector Layers 

Your Vector Shapes can now have strokes - and those strokes can have solid, gradient, or pattern fillsIt’s a subtle change, but Shape Layers are now Vector Layers, and along with the new nomenclature comes the ability to add all sorts of strokes, including… dashed and dotted lines! Yes, you read that right, no more copy-pasting from Illustrator - you can do it all right in Photoshop. Another feature that’s sure to be hugely appreciated by those doing pixel-precise work is the new Align Edges checkbox, which lives up to its name, forcing Vector Shapes to align to Photoshop’s Pixel Grid, eliminating those fuzzy, anti-aliased edges that we’d sometimes see when creating vectors in Photoshop.

Enhanced Video Editing

Video editing in Photoshop has gained powerful, but simple to use featuresThis is another area of Photoshop that has been improving progressively over the last several iterations of the software, and this version is no exception. New to CS6 is the ability to preform basic audio edits on a separate track, as well as to quickly add simple transitions between video clips. Also, where video has always been a feature of the Extended version of Photoshop, Adobe has decided that video editing is for the people, so now it’s in the Stsndard version as well. 

Content-Aware Move Tool

Content-Awareness has been all the rage in the last few updates, starting with Scaling in CS4 and then Fill in CS5. CS6 brings Content-Aware Move, allowing you to easily remix images by moving elements from one place to another, and filling in the background contextually, based on the surrounding pixels. More voodoo magic from the big-brained engineers at Adobe. This one works better as a video demo, so check out Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes’ sneak peek from a few weeks back:

Revamped 3D Engine

The 3D engine has been revamped completely, focusing on usability and performanceIn another lifetime, I was a pretty hardcore 3D guy, so the consistent, iterative improvements in the Photoshop 3D engine hit a special note for me. The difference between what Photoshop was capable of back in CS3 when 3D was introduced and what it’s capable of now is sort of mind-blowing. From the more streamlined interface, to the beefed up ray-tracing and image-based lighting capabilities, this is a comprehensive and welcome update. 

Performance, Performance, Performance

If I had been making this list in some sort of order, this feature would be number one, because Adobe has really pulled out all the stops as far as making Photoshop scream in this update. Wherever possible, they have offloaded the heavy lifting to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) via what they’re calling the Mercury Engine. All that on-canvas editing, the new rich cursors, the Blur Gallery tools, the insanely robust retooled Liquify filter, 3D, painting and video - they all benefit from a significant performance boost if you have even a remotely recent graphics card. 

Bonus Pick: Adaptive Wide-Angle

The original image, stitched from 15 carelessly shot images, and the results, produced using the Adaptive Wide Angle filterSeverely distorted fisheye images can be unwrapped using the Adaptive Wide-Angle tool, and it’s really, really impressive.

Trace lines in the photo that are supposed to be straight, and the tool, using lens profiles and metadata embedded in the photo (if available) will figure out how to correct it. This is another filter that elicits “oohs” and “aahs” when demoed, and for good reason, as the results are dramatic.

There you have it - some of my favorite new features of Photoshop CS6. I will be posting some more detailed tutorials on some of these features in the coming days and weeks, so stay tuned.

Of course there are hundreds of other improvements under the hood, but since this is still considered a beta release, nothing is set in stone. Speaking of which - there’s still time for you to have a say in what makes it into the final release of the software. Download the beta, and vote on features, and add your feedback and questions to the forums. See you there, and have fun with Superstition. 

Noise Reduction in Camera Raw 7.0

Swiping through my photo collection on my iPad, I came across a photo I shot in Stonington CT last summer, of a really dramatic stormy sunset at the pier. 

Maybe it was my mood or something, but looking back on the image six months later, I thought that it was nice, but the way I had post-processed it didn’t really convey the ominous and dramatic feeling I had when I was standing there. So using Nik Software’s very excellent SnapSeed for iPad, I gave the image a bit more punch, as seen in the photo below.

Great - much more dramatic and otherworldly, but now SnapSeed has found every bit of noise my noise-challenged Canon G10 has imbued the image with, and exacerbated it. I guess a noisy photo is better than no photo… but there has to be a better option, right? Then I remembered the impressive noise reduction capabilities that Brian O’Neil Hughes showed off in his sneak peek of what’s coming up in the new version of the Camera Raw plugin, and then I remembered he mentioned that the same features are available in the new freely available Lightroom 4 Beta. I fired that up, and here’s the result:

Impressive indeed. I’m an Aperture guy, and my workflow is pretty well-entrenched in that software so I’m unlikely to make the switch to Lightroom (though I won’t rule it out entirely). Hopefully the folks at Apple step their game up in the noise reduction department, but in the meantime, once Photoshop Next (or whatever it’s going to be called) comes out, I’m definitely going to be incorporating Camera Raw 7’s noise reduction into my workflow for salvaging images - especially those shot with that poor old G10.

FlySi!

Here’s a logo I made for my online moniker, using nothing but Illustrator and Photoshop. Maybe I’ll blog a little bit about how I made it another time, as I think a lot of people aren’t fully aware of Photoshop’s impressive 3D capabilities.

Happy New Year: Year of the Dragon

I didn’t get a chance to get out and shoot any pictures during this year’s Chinese New Year Celebration, so I thought I’d re-post one of my old favorites from last year. Kung Hey Fat Choy!

From the Archives: Buried

A car sits buried up to its windows in snow after the blizzard that ended 2010 for us up here on the east coast. What a difference a year makes…

Talib Kweli Graffiti

Seen in Dumbo, NYC.

Prospect Park Stairs

Here’s a serene, soothing image of a set of stairs in the woods in Prospect Park, that’s conveniently sized for your desktop. Where do they lead? I don’t remember, but it sure does look peaceful there.

Photoshop Image Deblurring Sneak Peek

Algorithm, my ass. This is f*cking voodoo magic.

From the Archives: My Desk

Skimming through my Aperture library, I came across what I now think is a really nice image. I like the lighting, I like the perspective… the processing makes me wonder what kind of mood I was in that night.

Finds like these make me wonder what other forgotten gems are languishing in my 40k+ image library, waiting to be rediscovered.

Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival

The festival was great this year - if a little over-crowded and chaotic. Performers included M.O.P, Diamond District, Random Axe (who I missed, thanks to some confusion with the line to get into the venue), and headliner Q-Tip.

Tip busted out a range of material - new, old, Tribe and solo joints, and featured several high-profile special guests, including Monie Love, Black Thought, Busta Rhymes, and Kanye West.

Welcome to America

If you were born in this country, there’s a good chance you’ve never seen this document, nor experienced the incredible, almost overwhelming flood of relief and gratitude that it brings to its recipient.

The USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Service) calls this document the welcome notice - it’s a letter informing the applicant that form I-485 - application to adjust to permanent resident status - has been approved. I got mine years ago, but I’ll never forget how I felt when I opened it.

Anyway, it seemed like an appropriate image to post on or around the 4th of July.

Project 365: Still Going

I’ve seriously slacked off with my Project 365 during the month of June, having either cheesed out and shot some very last-minute images, or worse - having skipped several days outright. Still, I’ve been limping along resolutely, and have even managed to produce some images I’m downright thrilled with, like the one shown above from the annual Mermaid Parade. The project continues over on Flickr - head on over and check it out.

Pumas

Although we live in a culture that encourages us to constantly run out and buy shiny new things, I’m beginning to appreciate the old and well-used more and more.

With that in mind, here’s a detail of my very well-used Pumas, that have seen many, many miles on my various travels here in the US, and overseas. Now that I think about it, they have climbed two volcanoes, including Mt. Vesuvius, and Mt. Liamuiga in St. Kitts.

Pompeii, with Mt. Vesuvius in the background

The view at the top of Mt. Liamuiga’s crater

Eugenia, Icee Vendor

I was doing one of my usual rambling walks in Prospect Park yesterday afternoon - despite the fact that I don’t usually have a goal or destination, these walks make me feel like I’m actually doing something with my weekend.

I happened to make eye contact and smile at the woman selling icees by one of the entrances to Prospect Park. She returned my smile, and despite the fact that I’m usually really shy about asking to photograph strangers, that is exactly what I found myself doing.

I learned a couple of things from this exchange - one was that photographing strangers isn’t that scary. In fact, when I showed her the shot I had made on the back of my camera, she told me that she thought the photo was “muy linda”, and seemed really happy - which was very rewarding to me. I also learned that while I’m still a huge fan of the candid, unposed stuff that the hardcore street photographers do, a posed portrait of a stranger is also very satisfying.

Timberlands

My trusted companions on many miles of urban (and sometimes not) terrain. There's really nothing wrong with these things after how many ever years, but I think it's finally time to retire these bad boys.

Incidentally, I don't think I want to get into the world of product photography, but this was still a great exercise. Plus, you know... Never say never.

Adobe's Mobile Apps for iPad

A week or two ago, Adobe announced a rare .5 update to its Creative Suite (bringing its latest version to CS 5.5). In conjunction with this update,  Adobe also previewed three apps for the iPad which make use of a new touch interface for Photoshop. Those apps — Adobe Eazel, Adobe Nav and Adobe Color Lava — are available today from the iTunes App Store.

I really like the apps - above is my first Eazel painting. It has a very natural feel, and convincingly conveys the effect of paint that starts out wet and dries gradually, but is sorely lacking (among other things) a multiple undo feature. When you’re done, you can send your master work to Photoshop on your computer for further editing, or do the usual stuff with it on your iPad (email, share, etc.).

The apps are all pretty fun and innovative, but I think their real purpose is to spark ideas, and to inspire other developers to take advantage of the new Photoshop Touch SDK that Adobe also released, and I can’t wait to see what people come up with.

Saturday Morning

The few times I'm up and about before the city fully wakes up make me wish I was more of a morning person.

Riding

Cyclists riding through Prospect Park on a late spring afternoon. From time to time, I decide to practice shooting panning images, because it’s a technique I really dig. In the past, I’ve managed to get my subject pretty sharp more or less by accident. This time, I finally clued in and flipped my camera from One Shot to AI Focus mode, and I think I nailed it.

Wired

I have a dresser in my office that’s full of my photography and gadget-related stuff. One drawer is dedicated mostly to cables, and these are the contents of that drawer. I don’t really remember actually going out and getting any of those cables - with the exception of that active extension USB cable, that is.

Not pictured is the 30’ FlashZebra sync cable that’s attached to my camera and the speedlite that I’m lighting this shot with.