The Magic of Adobe’s Photoshop CS5

Adobe’s Photoshop CS5 recently became available, and as usual, there’s plenty of magic for photographers under.

The star of the new Photoshop is without a doubt Content-Aware Fill. This technology takes Content-Aware Scaling, which first appeared in CS4, to the next logical level by enabling you to select an object — a stranger who wandered into your photo shoot, for instance — and then delete him from the photo. Content-Aware Fill will then examine the background surroundings and fill in the white space where your object formerly resided. It’s fun and often amazingly accurate. Here’s a video that shows how it works.

Also in the realm of magic is the Puppet Warp feature. Puppet Warp lets you recompose part of an object to achieve specific design goals. For instance, you can select an elephant’s trunk and change the curve of the trunk. Puppet Warp isn’t as easy to use as Content-Aware Fill and you won’t use it as much, but it’s cool nonetheless.

Adobe also has made it easier to select and mask intricate images with improvements to its Refine Edge tool, an enhancement that is less fanciful that Puppet Warp but will certainly be much more widely used. The software enables you to more accurately isolate an object from its background, and it’s particularly helpful with complicated edges like human hair.

Fans of high-dynamic range (HDR) photography will appreciate the HDR enhancements. The HDR Pro tool enables you to merge identical images taken at different exposures and combine the exposures to create a single shot with a very wide dynamic range. The tool also includes a Remove Ghosts feature that automatically removes artifacts that often occur when merging overlapping shots.

If you’re working with a single shot, however, the HDR filter is a fun addition that enables you to easily adjust the toning of the image to mimic the effects of HDR photos.

The Camera Raw 6 plug-in, which ships with CS5, has been updated to support new camera models; in all, 275 models are supported. Camera Raw 6 also has improved sharpening and noise removal, and lets you apply film grain when editing a RAW image.

Adobe also added a lens-correction feature that corrects the three most common lens-based errors: geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. You can also create custom profiles of your lenses.

As usual, Photoshop doesn’t come cheap. CS5 is $699 for the full version, or $199 for an upgrade from previous versions.

from http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/the-magic-of-adobes-photoshop-cs5/?scp=2&sq=adobe&st=cse