Adobe unveils major Photoshop update to celebrate its thirtieth birthday
Here’s what’s new in Photoshop.
This month Adobe Photoshop celebrates its thirtieth birthday and to celebrate there are major updates to the desktop program and iPad app for heavily used tools like Content Aware Fill and Object Selection. Here’s what you need to know about what’s new.
Photoshop for desktop
The Content-Aware fill workspace has been updated so that users can make multiple selections and apply fills in a single window. A new “apply” button allows you to preview fills in an image before committing to them. In the newest version, users have the ability to sample all of the layers within the workspace. The new features are meant to reduce clicks, speed up the editing process and give creators a more realistic fill.
The Lens Blur feature is now on the GPU, which improves realism if you are adding synthetic blur to the foreground, background or the middle of an image.The new version allows you to add colorful bokeh and specular highlights as well.
The desktop version now supports dark mode, has a more buttery mouse experience, and panning and zooming operations are smoother and more responsive.
Photoshop for iPad
Photoshop for iPad debuted just last year and Adobe is already adding increased functionality to the app. The Object Selection tool has been added to this latest release and now features all the same functions as the tool on the desktop version. The Object Selection tool is similar to the Select Subject tool—both use Adobe’s Sensei AI and machine learning—but Object Selection gives users more control over the selection process. The new tool will be particularly useful when working with images with multiple objects. Users draw a rectangle over the region they want to select and the machine learning automatically finds the object within that area. Check out how it works in the video above.
The new version includes typographic controls as well, where users can adjust tracking, leading, scaling and formatting. Kerning adjustments will come in a later release.
Learn more about the new features in Photoshop over on the Adobe blog.
