Photoshop Tricks

5 Comments for this entry

• Nathan Andersen
  July 28th, 2010 on 4:22 pm

  Review by Nathan Andersen for Adobe Photoshop Extended CS5 Student & Teacher Edition [Mac]
  Rating:
  Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2R64AGVLK5RJG Photoshop has for a long time been the top-of-the-line photo editing program on both PCs and Macs. We had a student version on an old iMac back when my wife and I were in college, but when I upgraded to a Macbook Pro I picked up Elements (first Elements 6 and now instead of full-blown Photoshop. It seemed to do everything I could imagine wanting to do with photos and more.

  I never imagined you could do what you can with the latest version of Photoshop, though. If you’ve ever thought about upgrading to the full version of Photoshop, now would be the time, especially if you are a student and can get the student price, or if you can get the upgrade price. Some of the features on this new version are nothing short of astonishing.

  First of all, it can do all the usual adjusting and layering and touch up and effects, and seems to do them better than ever. It appears to be quite stable, and very fast, possibly owing to the new 64-bit support on CS5. I’ve been working with Photoshop CS5 Extended every day for a few weeks (on a Macbook Pro, OS 10.6.3, 28GHz, 4GB Ram) and haven’t had any problems or glitches. It installed without a hitch and runs nicely. No slow downs, no hangups, no crashing.

  One thing I like is that when you open another program in Mac, the photoshop tools and utilities windows hide out of the way until you go back into it. Final Cut doesn’t do that, for example, which means that if I’m working on Final Cut I need to move my windows out of the way to get at other things, or use Spaces and set my apps on different spaces windows in order to be productive.

  There are three basic parts to the Photoshop package: an organizer (Adobe Bridge), a non-destructive photo adjuster (Adobe Raw, which is designed for RAW format photos but works on JPEGs as well), and an editor (Photoshop, which does ordinary adjustments and tweaks but also works with layers and masks and an inexhaustible array of effects to allow you to do pretty much anything you could possibly imagine with your photos).

  What’s new in CS5?

  Mini Bridge – in addition to the ordinary Bridge program that helps organize your photos (and other files for use with other CS5 programs), Photoshop includes the Mini Bridge that functions like a bridge app that opens within photoshop itself. It only works, though, if Bridge is already open.

  Refine edge – Photoshop’s selection tools are already pretty astonishing, and with the new refine edge tools (that work both for selections and for masks) they’ve gotten much more sophisticated, allowing you to fine tune selections in pretty amazing ways. For example with frizzy hair, where you can see through the hair at the edges to a background, refine edge can usually allow you to select just the hair and not the background. There’s even a tool that allows you to get rid of reflections from the background on the subject. When I do green screen photography, it’s always difficult to avoid getting some green light bounce on the perimeter of the subject. What’s truly amazing is that with Photoshop’s selection tools and refine edge, you really don’t even need to use the green screen because you can replace the background of most photos without it.

  New painting options – there are a whole range of new brushes you can paint with and each brush can be adjusted for thickness and stiffness, and several other properties that make photoshop into a true painting program, and allow you to use painting to either modify existing photos or create original artworks. The coolest painting feature is the “Mixer Brush” that allows you to treat a photograph as if it were covered in wet paint and to either paint from it as if it were a palette or to mix other colors with the existing colors on the photo.

  3D & Puppet Warp – you can take a photo and make it into a 3-D postcard that can be rotated and re-oriented however you like. Additionally you can create three dimensional objects or make elements of photographs into 3-D objects so you can experiment with different ways of laying them out. Puppet Warp allows you to take an object and move its elements around – turning a head or raising an arm for example.

  Improved HDR Pro Support – you can shoot photos with a range of exposures and it will bring them together in a single shot that captures all the nuance you want; you can then adjust these in case you want, say, to flatten the shadows or want less nuance in the highlights of a certain area in the photo. Note that this can even work if you don’t have a tripod and just eyeball the frames, since the program will automatically detect the overlap regions. Pretty cool.

  Content Aware Fill – of course the most astonishing feature of CS5 is the content aware fill. CS4 (and Photoshop Express 9) already had the content aware transform that allows you to shrink a photo and let it know which parts you don’t want warped and which parts you’d like to lose. Content Aware fill is like a mixture between that function and the healing brush tool. You can select, say, a piece of garbage on the lawn in an otherwise nice photo, then fill it with content aware fill and Photoshop will reconstruct a seamless piece of lawn turf in the place of the garbage. You can get rid of a stranger who wandered into your frame without doing any cropping or resizing (provided that the background that needs to be filled in is not too complicated). You can even fill in gaps in a panorama shot (where you take a few photos in order to get an expanded range). Some of this would be possible already with older versions of Photoshop but would take hours; but some of the things you can do with this tool are simply magical. (For a quick illustration of how it works, see the brief attached video).

  Online Review Feature – another new thing that would be quite handy for the professional user, or for someone collaborating with others artistically, is the online review function. Basically it allows you to upload the latest version of your image and notify others it’s there. They can then go into the image and post comments, both general comments and comments tied to specific parts of the photo, and then those comments appear ready to review and read by the original poster.

  Summing Up

  This is not really a beginner’s program. For those who want to just tweak exposure and color balance, stick with iPhoto or something simple. For slightly more complicated fixes, but with a smaller learning curve, stick to something like Photoshop Elements. If you really want to work magic with your photos, though, and if you’re willing to put in some serious time trying things out (and going through the seemingly endless tutorials online) – or if you already know Photoshop or Elements and you know how much time it can take to do some of the fixes that the Content Aware tool can solve in seconds, you really ought to check out this latest version of Photoshop. It’s pretty amazing.
  
• R. A. Delaney
  July 28th, 2010 on 4:23 pm

  Review by R. A. Delaney for Adobe Photoshop Extended CS5 Student & Teacher Edition [Mac]
  Rating:
  this is much the same as CS4 but with a few new features,but one thing you should know is that most plug-ins currently only work in 32bit,therefore you must start it in 32bit(double click on the PS icon in finder and “get info”,then tick the box “open in 32bit”).The problem here is that PS CS5 can only access 2gb ram max(because its been rewritten in cocoa as opposed to CS4 being written in carbon,and cocoa has a higher ram overhead),unlike 32bit CS4 which can access 4gb ram,so perhaps it would be wise to hold on to your cs4 until all the plug-ins are re-written as 64bit,most will be available in the next 3 months.apart from this its a nice upgrade! the previous review by Nathan Andersen covers the new features well,I subtracted one star for the RAM problem.
• ALAN J MANGIARATTI
  July 28th, 2010 on 4:26 pm

  Review by ALAN J MANGIARATTI for Adobe Photoshop Extended CS5 Student & Teacher Edition [Mac]
  Rating:
  Great product, quick delivery from Amazon. Just make sure you have the student verification materials to send to Adobe so they will send you the activation numbers you need to install this program. It is usually a jpeg of your student’s college ID or a tuition bill or both if the ID does not have a date on it which I believe is often. Our college student had all the documentation she needed and had no problem.
• David Hufnagel
  July 28th, 2010 on 4:26 pm

  Review by David Hufnagel for Adobe Photoshop Extended CS5 Student & Teacher Edition [Mac]
  Rating:
  I bought this project having experience with Photoshop CS2. I was a bit concerned that I would not easily transfer my knowledge from CS2, but I found that although CS5 has made a lot of good changes they kept all the main features and have them organized in the same way. This was great because I could use all that i know from CS2 as well as use the cool new functions of CS5. This software is smooth, and incredibly useful. If you have never used photoshop before I would also highly recommend it. You wouldn’t believe the things you can do and how real you can make it. This is the program the professionals use so you can now work on their level. Two thumbs way up!
• K. Morazzi
  July 28th, 2010 on 5:22 pm

  Review by K. Morazzi for Adobe Photoshop Extended CS5 Student & Teacher Edition [Mac]
  Rating:
  Adobe makes a great product, and if you’re a student or teacher, you can enjoy it at such an awesome deal, right here at Amazon! Offers all the features of the regular extended version, only drawback is the inability to upgrade. Not a problem for me!