Issue Seven - Conversations on Technology, Business and Society

44
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ADOBE
Photoshop CS5
BY ALBERT MUCUNGUZI
CS5
is the twelfth version of
Photoshop. After 20 years of
development and this many
versions, most programmers would have run out
of ideas, and updates would just be minor patches.
Not so for Adobe though; this latest version of
Photoshop contains many new features and major
improvements, certainly enough to make users of
CS4 seriously consider an upgrade. The new feature
everyone is talking about is of course the amazing
Content-Aware Fill, but other equally significant
improvements include sophisticated new selection
tools, improved HDR image creation, new painting
tools, automatic lens correction, the novel Puppet
Warp feature, and perhaps most importantly
for photographers, vastly improved Camera
Raw processing, including new noise reduction
algorithms.
In the weeks leading up to the launch of CS5
there were several videos available on YouTube
showing the new Content-Aware Fill feature in
operation, being used to seamlessly remove
unwanted objects from photos or fill in missing
background areas. There’s no question that
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Adobe Photoshop has been the industrystandard
image editing software for
two decades now, and is used by
professional photographers, artists and
designers all over the world. Despite
the best efforts of competitors such as
Corel Paint Shop Pro, Apple’siPhoto, and
the open source GIMP, there really isn’t
anything that comes close to Adobe’s
flagship product in terms of features,
performance or quality.
There isn’t much that comes close
to the price either; the full version
of Photoshop CS5 for Windows PCs
costs over £600, while Photoshop
CS5 Extended (which adds video and
3D handling functions) costs close to
£900, and the whole Creative Suite 5
package, which includes Photoshop,
Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver,
Acrobat, Fireworks and more, can
cost over £1,600 depending on which
version you choose.
Content-Aware Fill is an amazing
feature, and playing with it is a lot
of fun, but in actual use it’s not as
useful as you might imagine. Those
demonstration videos were very
carefully contrived to show the feature
at its best, but in the real world the
results are often disappointing. It’s very
good at the easy stuff like removing a small blemish
from a plain or random-textured background,
in other words things that are easy enough
to do manually using the clone stamp or spot
healing brush, but larger objects or more detailed
backgrounds cause problems. If you look closely
at the example below you’ll see that there is still a
visible outline where the texture of the sea doesn’t
quite match up. On the plus side though it is a lot
quicker than painstakingly cloning out unwanted
details.
Another impressive looking feature is the Puppet
Warp function, which was also previewed
in demo videos. It allows 2D objects to be
manipulated and re-shaped, and even overlapped.
For all its technical cleverness this too is only likely
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PC TECH | SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2010 | pctechmagazine.com