Current event post

While it may not be the most interesting or stunning news in the world of art right now, I'm extremely satisfied with the release of Adobe's CS6 package. Over the past few months Adobe and popular art media outlets have been publishing all the great stuff that has been coming along with the debut of CS6 and its beta, namely the major changes to Photoshop, and users are in for a surprise with some of the great new things coming their way. Having already downloaded the standalone Photoshop version, I can say I'm quite happy with what new things I've encountered so far.

For one, almost everything runs much smoother than the previous version. Large format works process much more quickly with tools such as smudge, filters, content awareness, and blur effects as long as the hardware  you're using can keep up with Adobe. The CS5 version was severely bottle necking the user's CPU, especially on Windows machines, but the improved algorithms have been showing off quite nicely, even in 1920x1080 resolution and higher. I was curious on how much better these changes might be so I opened up the same file in the CS5 version as well as CS6 and applied a complicated pointilize filter over a 3x3 foot image. CS6 blew away CS5 by almost 5 seconds. I tried it again at 5x5 foot and it was almost 10 seconds faster during that application.

Something users will recognize right off the bat is that the interface for CS6 is slightly different. A couple of the tools on the left side of the UI have different looking icons, and the default windows and options on the right hand side from CS5 are nonexistent until you activate and customize them in CS6. However, the windows blend together very smoothly and get minimized nicely. Another noticeable tweak is that your background colors are now a muted gray color instead of the standard white of every other version. The feedback is much lighter on your eyes, and makes your own work pop out much more clearly. Personally, I think it gives the whole UI a nice, updated and refreshing look.

The last thing I'd like to mention about CS6 is the huge improvement to the content awareness tool. Taking unwanted portions out of pictures or elongating sections has never been easier. In July when I made my "8 Bit Blast" piece I literally recreated half of my right chest with the content awareness tool and it looked just fine after I smoothed and blurred everything out. Some of the demos I've watched in recent weeks have been absolutely stunning, even on complicated images like forests and seascapes. The tool is now basically foolproof and can be used for tasks of all ranges as long as you remember to try it out.

There's plenty of other fun and exciting new things for CS6 including lots of 3D imaging techniques and video editing applications, but the things that I mentioned previously are the ones that I've had the most fun with as of yet.