Adobe Photoshop CS5

[colin_mattson1]

<p><a href="http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-10050-10663">According to Rob Galbraith</a>, Adobe's going to release some sort of utility that will allow printing without color management.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>Kevin, upgrade from CS4 is in Europe 240 euros. I have not upgraded with the extended version. Is there one ?<br>

By the way thanks Patrick for the info above. I'm like you discovering CS5 slowly. I hope the printing question can be solved. I also print on Epson and found the solutions like others here with the CS4.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>By the way I can't see why the change in the printing dialogue is a problem. You can make all the decisions in the first and don't need to go to the Epson driver. It is easier as far as I can see - when we get used to it. Still we have the problem with the color management to be solved.</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>thanks for the visit and your insight, Jeff.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>For color management problems in CS5 go to <a href="http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/834/cpsid_83497.html">here</a><br>

Adobe is working on the problem and will prepare a download!</p>

[midan_smith]

<p>for me it is running significantly faster in 32bit due to more use of my graphics card and its much faster memory.. unexpected benefit. content aware fill is very good most of the time, puppet warp may replace some of the larger scale function of liquify for me, but cant touch it for fine details, which is what most of liquify is for. the new selection radius tool is pretty nifty for hair, but still requires some fine tuning of the mask afterwards, but getting pretty good results with a quick magic wand and this new one.</p>

[colin_mattson1]

<blockquote>

<p>By the way I can't see why the change in the printing dialogue is a problem. You can make all the decisions in the first and don't need to go to the Epson driver.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>You still need to go to the Epson (or Canon or whatever) driver settings to print—you just now have to do it by hand instead of logically being dumped there automatically. Maybe it makes more sense if you print on the same paper or at least with the same settings consistently, but I switch between a handful of papers and between color and B&W. </p>

<p>When the driver pops up, it's my reminder to check my settings and make sure I'm not throwing away ink and paper. Now with CS5 you click print, and it's printing with whatever settings the driver's held onto.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>Colin, let's see what Adobe Lab comes up with. As mentioned they are working on the "problem".</p>

[john_a5]

<p>I also got the CS5 yesterday and have a few observations.</p>

<p>Content aware fill and brush are near worthless from what I have tested so far. Selecting a smallish area on a 21mp file of blue sky with bare tree "twigs" in it, with white building below-but lots of blue sky above and around. I was careful not to select the building, which was a perfect straight edge. I got a new addition to the building and some of that mush you get when you selected a little too much with the heal brush. I expected to get a nice blue sky. My take is that it is no better than the healing brush or patch tool was.</p>

<p>Raw sharpening-this was completely redone and if you use a "standard" setting for your files, it will be overdone. I believe a little sharpening in raw is good, especially for large MP files, but I am finding that about half of my old settings are enough. But need to do some more testing.</p>

<p>I hate HDR and haven't found the new "controls" any better, you can still make incredible crappy HDR's, but I couldn't get a reasonable tone map result on my initial tests to bring in a sky or lighten shadows--everything remained very muddy and essentially unusable.</p>

<p>The new selection tool tests were mixed for me. One set got me close quickly, but another image was problematic. I think you need to combine different approaches and revisit the refine edge after each iteration--haven't had time to explore it fully yet.</p>

<p>Best thing so far, and minor, is that the zoom tool can now work by selecting a point and sliding right to magnify and left to reduce. This is more controllable than the hold it down and auto zoom feature introduced in CS4, but when this is the setting chosen, you can't "select" an area for zoom (but that setting is available). I like the new feature here, but will just need to get used to it, very nice control and quick on the zooming in and out!</p>

[john_a5]

<p>I should add that the mini bridge is actually pretty handy, although you do need bridge open in the background to use it. If I have several images in a folder I want to work on, or combine, it is nice to have them right there and in the case of adding one to a layer, just dragging it over!</p>

[oskar_ojala]

<p>Thanks for these insights. What I'm myself really interested in how does content aware fill work in different situations (and how fast). Patrick, I think you CAF test image was too easy ;-)</p>

[midan_smith]

<p>I found content aware to be pretty useful, on one image it made short work of a wire fence, on another it fixed a lot of chips and scuffs on textured wood on an old church organ. Sure its easy enough to fool, but does most of what it is asked, then a little bit of 'pre-content aware' healing brush and stamping finishes the job. on one image i tried to do a very large content fill but it told me i didnt have enough ram (12mp image in 16bit, only 2 gig ram so thats fair enough)</p>

[john_a5]

<p>Reading Richard's comment, I will say I did notice some new things with PSCS5, it does seem that there are some pretty demanding algorithms being used. I was working on 21mp 16bit files with 4gb of ram and the refine edges tool was snappy at first, then bogged down big time as I worked along. I think it wants some significantly bigger firepower than even my 3 year old Mac tower(intel 4 processors).</p>

[Uhooru]

<p>Its not your processors John, It wants more RAM. Go up to 8GB and see the difference.</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>Since CS4, the video card makes a huge difference in overall Photoshop performance, too.</p>

[kyleweems]

<p>I have found content-aware fill extremely useful. Is it perfect? absolutely not, I didn't expect it to be. Is it right for every situation? nope. Does it do certain things very well? yup.</p>

<p>I find that for the things I want to use it for, it does about 80% of the work for me most of the time. When what I'm doing is filling in a large gap around a panorama, or wiping out crap in the background.. that's quite helpful. The coolest thing it has done so far was remove a disembodied hand from a cropped image.. the hand went over both a dress and jeans and it filled it in perfectly, completing the edge of the dress without blurring the two textures/colors together. One selection, one fill, done.. cool.</p>

[larry_felix]

<p>FWIW, after CS5 was announced, I upgraded my copy of PSCS3 to PSCS4 on March 30 (ordering directly from Adobe) and I just received a free upgrade to PSCS5. I did have to call Adobe and ask for it, however. After they verified the details of my March 30 upgrade order, they shipped out the free upgrade to PCCS5 with no shipping costs. Nice. </p>