What’s New in Adobe Photoshop CS6? In-Depth Report of Photoshop’s New and Improved Features

Can’t wait for the new Photoshop? Here’s an in-depth report on all of the new and improved features you can expect in Photoshop CS6. Check back to this article frequently for the latest updates!

General Updates


Interface

The very first feature you’ll notice in Photoshop CS6 is the new dark color theme which is designed to match other Adobe products such as After Effects and Lightroom. If you don’t like the color, you can change it back to the Light Gray theme or customize it to any color you like.

Screenshot of Photoshop CS6 dark interface

Interface colors are adjustable through the preferences

Video demonstration of Photoshop’s new interface

Background Save

Saving large files? Photoshop will save files in the background so you can immediately continue your work in Photoshop.

Background save progress bar

Demonstration of background save

Preset Manager

Photoshop makes migrating your presets and preferences from CS5 to CS6 easy with the new Preset Manager. You can also save these presets/preferences and load them onto other other computers.

Save and load presets with the new Preset Manager

Filters


Liquify Filter

The Liquify filter has undergone major performance enhancement. You can now edit photos with no lag – adjustments are made on the fly! In addition, the maximum brush size has increased from 1500 to 15000 pixels.

Photoshop CS6’s new Liquify filter lets you edit without lag

Adaptive Wide Angle

The Lens Distortion tool was great for fixing small lens distortions but was very limited with wide angle/fisheye distortions. This new tool will let you remove curved lines – just draw lines over straight edges and Photoshop will automatically fix it. It’s apparently very easy to use with few settings to adjust.

Photoshop’s new Adaptive Wide Angle magically corrects wide angle/fisheye distortions better than the Lens Correction filter

Field Blur, Iris Blur, and Tilt Shift

These types of blurs have popular recently and people were using a combination of blur filters and layer masks to create it. It’s easier than ever in CS6 with dedicated filters for these blur effects.

The new blur filters

Screenshot of the new blur filters

Demonstration of the new blur filters

Oil Paint

Like artistic filters? This new Oil Paint filter can turn your photos into oil paintings in one step.

Image created with the Oil Paint filter

Adobe Image Deblur

This filter is potentially available in CS6. It restores blurry photos caused by camera shake (not lens blur, wrong focusing, etc). It works by detecting the path of the camera shake and using its own algorithm to correct the blur. The results are magical.

How Adobe Image Deblur works

Demonstration of Adobe Image Deblur at the 2011 Adobe MAX conference

Tools


Selection Tools (marquee, lasso, etc.)

The selection tools will now allow you to apply a value with a decimal point to the feather setting (ex. 1.5px)

Eyedropper Tool

The Eyedropper tool has new options which lets your tool ignore adjustment layers and/or sample from the current layer or below. This applies to all the eyedropper tools (ex. black point, white point, white balance tool, etc).

Brush Tool

There are many new improvements to the brush tool. The first update is rich cursor support for the brush tool. You can now adjust your brush settings using hot keys and see a live preview of your brush size, feather, and opacity. Speaking of opacity, there is a new hot key for changing the opacity (Ctrl/Cmd+Alt/Option+Up/Down). In addition, the maximum brush size has been increased from 2500 to 5000 pixels – you can expect to see even higher resolution Photoshop brushes when CS6 comes out!

Demonstration of the new rich cursor support for the Brush tool

Patch Tool

A new Content-Aware mode for the patch tool allows you to remove objects more precisely using content-aware technology. This tool is great for removing objects near the edge of your photo.

New Content-Aware mode for the Patch tool

Demonstration of the Patch tool on content-aware mode

Content-Aware Move Tool

Content-aware technology was great for removing objects in Photoshop CS5. Now you can use content-aware technology to move objects! This tool makes it easy to move people and objects around.

Content-Aware Move tool

Demonstration of the Content-Aware Move tool

Text tool

Designers rejoice! Now you can generate Lorem Ipsum text without having to visit a website to generate it – it’s built right into Photoshop’s Text tool.

Vector Path Tools

The Vector Path tools have been updated to improve the dragging of vector curves. You can also turn paths into dash and dotted lines and apply gradients to them!

Turn paths into dashed and dotted lines

Demonstration of the new dashed and dotted lines feature in Photoshop CS6

Transform Tool

Now you can resize and transform objects with better quality! The new interpolation options let you resize objects using Nearest Neighbor, Bilinear, Bicubic, Bicubic Smoother, Bicubic Sharper, or the new Bicubic Automatic mode which picks the best method for you. It also fixes the 90° bug.
90º Layer ROtations
Explanation of the Transform tool’s 90° glitch

Image Adjustments


Camera RAW

Camera RAW 6 has been upgraded to Camera RAW 7 which is already available in Lightroom 4. The new editing process makes retouching photos more intuitive and allows more room for recovery.

Camera Raw 6 vs 7

Recovering highlights using Recovery and Highlights

Demonstration of Camera Raw 7

Invert

This image adjustment is now available for 32-bit images.

Threshold

This image adjustment is now available for 32-bit images.

Image Size

The new Bicubic Automatic option automatically picks the best interpolation mode for you.

Layer Styles


Gradient Overlay

A new option to dither your gradient is available. Note that this option is already present with the other Gradient tools in CS5 – it seems like Adobe forgot about to add it to layer styles.
Dither for Gradients
Dither option in Layer Styles

Stroke

If you create gradient strokes, you can also enable this dither option.

Palettes


Layers Palette

The Layers palette has been revamped to make it easier to find layers and apply layer properties to multiple layers at once. The new filtering option lets you find layers by kind, name, effect, mode, attribute, or color. You can also apply blending modes, opacity, locking, and color label to multiple layers at once. The bugs which didn’t allow you to set the layers opacity to 0 or duplicate multiple layers using its hotkeys has been fixed. Shape layer attributes can be copied/pasted just like layer styles.

Find layers with the new filtering feature. Filter layers by kind, name, effect, mode, attribute, or color.

Apply color labels to multiple layers at a time

Channels Palette

The Split Channels command now works for documents with more than one layer (no need to flatten image before using this command).

Gradient Palette

New split-toning presets.

Actions Palette

Now you can record tools! Simply enable the “Allow recording of tools” option and you can create Photoshop actions with tools (ex. Brush tool).

3D

Photoshop CS6 Extended will have enhanced 3D performance and updated tools to make it easier to change position, color, material, shadow, and light source of your 3D objects.

File Handling


Auto-Rotate

When you open photos, Photoshop will read the metadata and rotate the image to its correct orientation. Now you can undo or disable this feature in the preferences.

New Document

New image dimension presets for common devices like iPhones, iPads, etc.

File Format

Photoshop CS6 will support the new 3D image file formats (JPS and PNS) as well as BIGTIFF. TIFF files support more bit depth and OpenEXR files have new choices for handling transparencies.

Automate

Miss the PDF Presentations and Contact Sheet scripts in CS4? These have been reintroduced in CS6. If you’re into scripting, you can now write scripts that can get the tool name associated with the tool preset or return an array of guides in a document.

How to enable tool recording for your Photoshop actions

The reintroduced automation scripts

Release Date

Because Photoshop CS5.5 was released on May 2011, rumors speculate that CS6 will be released on May 2012 based on the new CS release schedule.

Do you know something we don’t know?

Help us make this article better by telling us what we’re missing or what we got wrong. Have better images/screenshots? Feel free to send those over too!
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