Review by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

As a longtime Photoshop user, I was most excited to hear that the Creative Suite 5 (CS5) release would be introducing some really useful tools to what is widely considered as the premier image editing application on any platform.

Our history with Adobe goes back to pre-history, with Aldus Pagemaker that we used on early Mac SE’s to create layouts for newspapers and magazines. Adobe bought Aldus, Pagemaker became InDesign and we latched on to Photoshop.

Photoshop, while essentially rooted as an image editing application and de facto photographer’s touch-up tool, was robust enough to be used for layouts, website design and even freehand drawing. In fact, a lot of the textures and backgrounds seen in the movie Avatar were painstakingly created in Photoshop, a testament to its versatility. As the years went by and as versions were upgraded, many of Photoshop’s tools were buried within its formidable yet complex menu system.

A lot of users, myself included, simply worked with a preset list of tools and features within Photoshop and most new features were optional. As a result, the version updates were not really a big deal. We were happily using CS3 without feeling the need to pay through the nose for CS4 when it came out because we felt we had all the features and performance we would ever need.

Photoshop CS5 ($699 for Standard stand-alone, $1299 for Creative Suite 5 Design Standard; upgrade pricing available), is however is a different story.

Yes, at first glance it looks like the same old Photoshop. The interface has not been greatly changed but once you discover its features under the hood, you realize that this iteration is indeed a giant, possibly revolutionary step.

Content Aware Technology Works Miracles

We don’t have time to go over all the new features but let’s focus on the most impressive and useful. Content Aware Fill, is almost CIA-level image manipulation. As sees from the video above, any user can simply remove complex objects from a photo and replace it with seamless, content-aware and incredibly accurate detail.

The example above shows a seaside scene with two people on the far right and a tree followed by a retouched version. We simply used Photoshop’s Content-Aware brush over the two people to ‘erase’ them from the scene. We used the Quick Selection tool to outline the tree and then erased it.

Consider that this scene is a complex one with sand, sea, sky and a number of textures and lighting conditions in play due to the cloudy nature of the photo. It took us all of  three minutes to remove the two people and the tree. It will take maybe another four minutes to calibrate everything and make it look just right but the process still shaves hours off jobs like these.

Months ago, work of this magnitude would be incredibly onerous even for the most seasoned pixel pusher but Photoshop CS5’s content-aware smarts are not just powerful they are unbelievably easy to use.

There is also a notable new feature called Puppet Warp that allows you to get an image, generate a wireframe and pivot points in order to move the image much like a puppet which is useful for frame-by-frame animation.

Painting Tools are an added bonus

Photoshop isn’t purely an image editing applications anymore. This is apparent once you look at the painting tools, which simulate not only different types of paint on different surfaces but also the behaviour of paint. For example how paint reacts and dries as it applies depending on the pressure is accurately simulated. They’ve even gone so far as to study and integrate different brush sizes and brush behaviours on surface. Tablet users can actually rotate the brush and get very accurate results.

Most of us who work on websites will be happy to know that Photoshop is a great tool for optimizing images for the web while retaining as much of the quality as possible. Hardcore designers will likely be using Adobe’s Fireworks to crunch images and graphics for the web but we find that Photoshop does a fairly decent and consistent job. Photoshop and the entire CS5 suite in general is the most impressive software release in 2010 in terms of innovation.

The Lowdown

If you’re a photographer or in the business of creating or design images, Photoshop CS5 is worth the price of admission. We found the new version totally delivered on all its major feature upgrades. More importantly, Photoshop’s ease not only cuts down the time it takes to make complex edits, anyone can do it. Still not convinced? Try out Photoshop’s Trial Demo (a 1.5GB download)

Rating: 5 out of 5

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