What Are the New Features in Adobe Photoshop CS6?

Adobe Photoshop is the leader in the computer graphics, photo editing and digital painting arenas. It has historically offered a wide range of essential features that make it the industry standard almost everywhere. Adobe's newest release of Photoshop, CS6, will be no exception to the longstanding rule of Photoshop quality. It introduces a number of brand new features and tools that can help make your graphics work easier, streamline the process, and produce breathtaking images.

Content-Aware Patch

The new content-aware patch allows you to remove undesirable content from a photo or other image, replacing it seamlessly with the background. The tool allows you to remove figures, vehicles and a wide range of other images, then show Photoshop the areas from which you'd like to sample. The program then automatically creates a new, seamless patch. This tool provides a considerable improvement in matching quality compared to Photoshop CS5's content-aware fill tool.

Mercury Graphics Engine

The Mercury graphics engine keeps you from having to wait to see the results when you're using warp, liquefy and other distortion tools. You get to see the changes in the image and adjust your settings nearly in real-time. That provides a high level of responsiveness and gives your work flow a much more fluid feeling.

Blur Gallery

Adobe Photoshop CS6 also offers a new blur gallery that lets you choose the perfect blur effect for your image. Instead of going through filters one at a time, you have the ability to work from a single panel, blurring whole areas, then sharpening a focal point, varying blurriness by choosing more than one focal point, or creating "tilt-shift" effects. The blur gallery relies on the Adobe Photoshop CS6 Mercury graphics engine, producing immediate results.

New Crop Tool

The crop tool in Adobe Photoshop CS6 offers a big change from the old-fashioned one found in CS5. The new tool automatically selects the whole image and gives you a wide range of presets, including "rule of thirds" and other popular image composition tools. It also allows you to quickly and easily straighten and modify the image from within the tool and still provides access to legacy controls.

Easy Video Creation

Since Adobe Photoshop CS6 is an invaluable product for video creation, the team has worked to make it even more effective at enhancing this medium. Video tools are available both in the standard and extended versions of the program, unlike in CS5. They also allow quick and easy trimming, addition and removal of audio, image adjustment, preset transitions and multiple export formats.

Adaptive Wide Angle

The adaptive wide angle tool in Adobe Photoshop CS6 allows you to easily straighten objects in panoramas or wide-angle and fisheye photos when they appear to be curved. On canvas tools can account for the physical characteristics of a specific lens, making the modifications based on the camera used to shoot the picture.

Background Save

Photoshop CS6 now allows you to save images in the background while you continue working. That means no more work flow slowdowns while you wait for large files to write to disk. You'll find that your productivity increases greatly and that you always have an up-to-date copy saved.