Thoughts on Photoshop CS5

Great upgrade.

Content-aware fill doesn’t always perform as well as it does in the Adobe demos, but it can save a heap of time. If it’s not perfect straight away, try again and you’ll probably get closer. Good enough for the Spot Healing tool to get its shortcut back.

Deleting on the Background layer invokes the content-aware fill, but deleting on any other layer does not. You’ll need shift-delete for that.

The new zooming behaviour is straight out of Apple’s Motion, and a vast improvement. Command-space-click and drag to immediately, interactively resize the image. Fast, responsive, awesome.

The revised brush resizing tool is faster, if a little less precise. Control-option-drag vertically to change sharpness and horizontally to change size. Was a little different before, but this is fine.

It’s fast. 64-bit uses more RAM on my system though apparently it will make a difference only with large images, and only works on Snow Leopard.

Other Dynamics in the Brush settings is now called Transfer.

Brush Presets is now a separate panel to Brush, which removes a point of confusion.

The new colour sampling tool is nice and the new natural-media style brushes are good too. Command-option-control-click for a superb new colour picker and never use the Color panel again.

I’ll be running some new Photoshop classes soon, so let me know (email iain@THISWEBSITE.COM) if you’re interested and I’ll let you know where they’ll be running.