Today Adobe has announced Photoshop CS5 (standard and Extended versions), together with new versions of all Creative Suite products (Adobe Premiere, etc.).
Main improvements of this release:
- lens correction automation: apart from being extracted from the Filter - Distort menu to be more visible, now it is automatable with lens profiles, that is chromatic aberration, distorsion and vignetting can be automatically corrected using a database of lens profiles! Some will be included in the product, others can be added by users (since there are so many lens models around...).
- new Adobe Camera Raw: shared with Lightroom Beta, a new RAW engine with enhanced capability on detail extraction and noise suppression.
- content aware retouching: completely new algorthms to remove unwanted objects, also large ones by automatically replacing the object with patterns from other areas of the same image (like trees, wall, sands) giving (apparently) magic effects. The spot healing brush and the fill function benefit from this interesting addition.
- improved HDR: better combination of multiple images into a high dynamic range one, also with a welcome "remove ghost" feature that suppressed objects that moved from one shot to the next ones.
- manipulation of part of an object: a so called "puppet warp" feature enable to anchor points of an image corresponding to specific parts (like a leg of a person, a tail of an animal) and then the user, by moving the anchor points, warps/manipulates the image. To be tried.
- a so called "mini-bridge" that is a reduced version of Adobe Bridge embedded into Photoshop for easier file browsing.
The Extended version, as known, adds mainly 3D and motion images support.
Many other "minor" improvements will be added (like changing the opacity of multiple layers in one move, saving all opened files, and so on), the full list is not yet known, since the products will be sold in about 30 days from now.
Estimated street price for Adobe Photoshop CS5 is US $ 699 and US $ 999 for Photoshop CS5 Extended, while upgrades from previous versions will be $149 and $349 respectively.