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Provides: Image enhancement, alteration, and creation.
Developer: Adobe
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.5.7 or greater, Intel processor, 1GB RAM, 2GB of disk space
Price: $699 for standard version ($199 for upgrade), $999 for extended version ($349 for upgrade), and is part of the Creative Design, Web Design, and Production Premium and Master Collection Suites.

If you've used Photoshop for years, get ready for some changes as to how you do things. With this new release, there are small traps hidden within a common interface. While none of these traps are bad, in fact most are great, they still might trip you up. But by no means should you let them get in your way to one of the best updates to Photoshop in years. This stellar release has many new ground-breaking features as well as many JDI updates we've been asking for for years. For some, the JDI (Just Do It) enhancements might be enough by themselves to make you want to update.

All of the improvements and enhancements within Photoshop are very surprising since from the very beginning of CS5, we've been warned by John Nack (Product Manager for Photoshop) that the conversion of Photoshop to full Cocoa would take up so much engineering time that users shouldn't expect much for the next release.

New with CS5 are startup screens that all have the same theme as other CS5 applications but individually they are unique. [All startup screens in Applelinks reviews have been reduced 35% across the board so that the largest ones will fit within the width restrictions we use at Applelinks.]

If you look around other reviews of Photoshop-CS5, you will likely see that they start talking about all the great wonderful new features. This review will be a bit different in that I'm going to start out with things that might catch you off guard. Then, just for fun, I'm going to focus on a few of the "little" things, JDI items. Finally I'll talk about some of the amazing new features.

Photoshop is now 64-bit on a Mac

Originally Photoshop CS4 was supposed to be 64-bit but Apple pulled a last minute switcheroo and stopped all conversion to a 64-bit Carbon release. At that point Adobe had to kill a big project and start from scratch in a mammoth project. While some people may think that now that Photoshop is fully 64 bit, it should run twice as fast (at least) as it did in 32-bit. The truth is that it wasn't supposed to and it doesn't. What Photoshop can do when run in 64-bit is to use more than 4 GB of ram. Prior to this, if you had 4, 6, 8, or 32 GB or ram in your computer, all Photoshop had access to was 4 GBs and no more. This will effect those who's images are monster in size, but if your images tend to be around 1-3 MBs in size, you will probably not see any difference at all.

Probably the biggest shock with the new 64-bit architecture is that unless your 3rd party plugins have updated to 64-bit, they will NOT function in 64 bit. They will not even show up as grayed out items in your menus, they will simply not exist. That doesn't mean they can't be used, it only means that until they are rewritten in 64-bit, they can't be used if Photoshop is started in 64-bit. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to switch back and forth: all you need to do is to locate your copy of Photoshop on your computer (it's probably in your Applications folder), click on the application to select it and then click Command-i, or from the File menu select "Get Info" and in the window that pops up. check the box that says "Open in 32-bit mode," and start (or restart) Photoshop. If you uncheck that check box, you are in 64-bit mode.

Without a doubt, the biggest area where this will hit people is their scanners and printers. People tend to not update either item with the frequency as they do their computers and if the drivers are not 64-bit, they will not work with PS in the 64-bit mode. The reality is that Printer and Scanner manufacturers have no motivation to update their older hardware with new drivers, it's more profitable for them to sell you new hardware with the updated drivers. If your printers is older, you will need to either reboot PS into 32-bit mode to print. With scanners, just don't bother using the Twain driver from within PS. Otherwise you can still scan the file using either the scanner's software or some 3rd party drivers, save it to your hard drive, and then open it into PS. While I like the elegance of scanning from within PS, I don't want to spend money to replace hardware that (itself) is having no problems or issues.

Scrubby Zoom

Probably the next shock you might have is when you first try to zoom with the same marquee approach you've used for years. What's happened is that Adobe has provided a new zooming approach called "Scrubby Zoom." With Scrubby Zoom, if you drag your cursor to the right, you'll zoom in and to the left you'll zoom out. There are two pieces of great news about Scrubby Zoom: first off, it's great. Once you get used to it, you'll love the interactive dynamics of how it works. The other piece of great news is that you can turn it off if you can't stand it by unchecking the check box in the Options Panel as shown below.

Adobe chose to leave it checked for discoverability reasons and I do feel they made the right choice although it's going to make some people think that either Photoshop or their computer has gone wacko. The biggest problem with Scrubby Zoom is that it is not universal across all of Photoshop. If you go into modal window (e.g., Liquefy), there is no Scrubby Zoom. Thus, you have to always be aware of where you are because in some places within Photoshop, you have Scrubby Zoom and in other places you do not. If you do not mind mentally flipping back and forth, you will love SZ, otherwise you might wish to turn it off and avoid the confusion.

Some of my favorite JDI items:

One of the problems with big applications like Photoshop is that the list of user requests for small features and fine-tuning has built up over the years and are always shunted to the side to make engineering time for the big ticket items that helps sell new copies of the program. So this year what the Photoshop team did was to intentionally put engineering time aside to fix, alter, and re-create a number of features that have been there for years and made them better. In other words, nothing new, just a better way to get to the same place.

Here are some of my favorites:

• "Thirds" grid when cropping. The long standing "rule of thirds" says that if you place the important object as the focus of your image at a location 1/3 from either side and/or 1/3 from the top or bottom (or at an intersection of those locations), your image will be more interesting. For years, Photoshop users have either eyeballed it or created a Grid with the Custom Shape tool to see a thirds grid to work with. Now, when you select the Crop tool, you have a new dropdown menu in the Options Panel that lets the crop region show "Nothing," (as it has for years) "The Rule of Thirds," or "Grid." While not as thorough as what Lightroom has had for years, it's a major step up from what it has been.
• Auto Straighten. For years, if you had held your camera at a slight angle when taking a photo, the way to straighten the image in PS was to go to the Eyedropper Tool, mouse down to see the other tool options, select the Tape Measure Tool, drag along the "almost" horizontal horizon, or the "almost" vertical wall, THEN go to Image > Image Rotation... > and select Arbitrary, and finally click the OK button. The image would then rotate so that what was almost horizontal is now horizontal (and likewise the same with vertical). Finally you'd have to crop the image as you tried to get as much of the image cropped without having to leave any edges out. Now, the first part is the same: after dragging the Tape Measure Tool along what you consider should be horizontal or vertical, you now can go to the Options Panel and click on the "Straighten" button. That's it, you're done. [What's curious is that if you go to the History Panel, you will see that a "rotate" step has been performed, but but no crop operation.]
• Make Default. If you use ever use any of the Layers' Styles, you are going to love this. Here's the problem: you want to use a stroke around a selection and it always comes up Black and the 3 point stroke is always on the outside. And every time you use this, you want a 5 point stroke, red, and the position of the stroke is on the inside. So every time you bring up the Stroke option, you have to change color, change the stroke size, and change the stroke position. And every time you reset things to what you want you scream out: "there's got to be a better way!!!" Good news: there is a new button in each of the Layer Styles' windows called "Make Default," and when this is clicked, whatever you had selected will then become the Default for that style. If later you want to change it back to the original default, simply click on the "Reset to Default" button.
• Stop the copy! This one doesn't mean much to me but is amazingly important to others: if you take a layer (e.g., "Layer 2") in Photoshop and drag that layer to the New Layer icon, your layer will be duplicated and have the name "Layer 2 Copy." Do it again and you get "Layer 2 Copy 2." Again will get "Layer 2 Copy 3," etc. Now there is an option in the Layer's Preferences to stop the word Copy and now if you did the same thing as above you'd have four "Layer 2" items, same name, no extra text or numbers. It's an option, do it any way you want. Just as a comment/suggestion: if you have more than three layers, it's a good idea to start renaming the layers and identifying what's in them.
• Cmd-h, Cmd-h, whatcha gonna do now? In just about any Mac app, if you tap Command-h, that application will hide. But for years, Command-h was used to hide marching ants, the selection aspect of selected text, and Color Sampler Tool indicators (to name a few options). Suddenly in CS4, selecting Command-h made Photoshop hide. So Adobe and their users were faced with a dilemma: follow years of tradition or follow (other) years of tradition. Now, the very first time you press Command-h Photoshop will ask you if you want that to mean "hide the application," or "hide the indicators." Once the choice is made, Photoshop will respect your wishes.
• From the Finder. Now you can drag an image from the Finder onto an image and it will be placed as a layer on that image. And here's an extra kicker: it will be placed as a Smart Object automatically. [There's a Preference that lets you turn off the Smart Object part of that scenario if you want.]
• ...and lastly (but certainly not least), Multiple layers, one Opacity Slider. In the past if you wanted to adjust multiple layers to all have the same Opacity, you'd have to set one, (mentally) note the Opacity percent and then enter that for all of the other layers. Now you can select multiple layers, drag out the Opacity, and do something else with your extra time.

Needless to say there are many more, but these are the ones that stick out in my head as I work away here. Now on to the big ticket items...

Content Aware Fill

This is one of the BNF (Big New Features) and it deserves all the praise it gets, mostly. The thing about CAF is that when it works, it's amazing, when it doesn't work right, it gets it mostly OK or strangely bad. But even in a worse case scenario, it WILL save you time.

Below is an example where it worked absolutely perfectly right out of the box: In the left hand image you can see that there was a bit of blue graffiti right in the middle on some cement. In the 2nd image you can see where I took the Lasso Tool and dragged a circle around the area. In the 3rd image you can see what happened after I pressed Shift-delete and the Fill window popped up, I selected "Content Aware Fill" for the filling option and pressed OK. Total time spent to fix this image, about 4 seconds. It would have taken me at least a couple of minutes to do this with the Rubber Stamp Tool and it probably would not have looked as good. Please note that the matching of texture, colors, and shading is perfect. [Extra note: the slight reddish tinge in the final image is OK as that also appeared in other regions of the whole image although out of sight in this cropped example.]

Unfortunately not every time you use CAF will you get great results. For example, when removing telephone wires it's probably that you will replace them with telephone wires. This is caused by PS looking around for similar types of pixels and if you have rows of telephone wires, select one, there's almost no way for PS to know that that's what you are trying to remove. I've found one way around this by grabbing a full section of sky including one wire, moving this to a new layer (command-j) and with that one wire in its own layer, there's no other wire in that layer so that wire is very successfully removed. Flatten the image, then as you move on to other wires, it's easier to grab new sections of one wire and sky, remove wire, flatten, continue.

Where CAF doesn't do well is if there is a broad region of non-continuous but uniform image parts. Consider the telephone wire overlapping the train shown below.

One thing that does help when doing sections like this is to not try to do the whole thing in one fell swoop. For this, I did the section around the cab and then the engine region. Below (on the top) you see the original image. Under this, I used the Spot Healing Brush Tool (this now has a Content Aware Fill option in the Options Panel) and I manually dragged across the wire. On the bottom below, you can see the strange results. The CAF either grabbed the wrong sections to mimic or just blurred the area when it didn't know what to do. Simply put, repairing this section of the train is going to take a lot of Rubber Stamp Tool and a lot of time. There are no shortcuts here.

The section just behind the cab is easier to achieve some improvement. Here again I used the Spot Healing Brush Tool and instead of manually dragging the brush I used a Click, then Shift-click (which gives you a straight line). Again, on the top, below, you see the original wire against the train. The 2nd image shows the SHB Tool's travel line and on the bottom the result. What stands out remarkably is the vertical ventilation region which is a fantastic end result. Curiously, to the right of that you can see that the ventilation grill extends too far to the right and the solid region somehow took the shade of gray seen below the wire.

Simply put, the CAF tool works absolutely amazingly well in some types of images and other images it's, well, not so good. Actually it can be crappy. But in the long run it's definitely worth trying to see if it can do magic. At a minimum, it will save you some time. At a maximum, it will save you a lot of time.

Before I forget, one other area where it can do wonders is after doing a panorama, you will invariably have sections around your image where there is nothing as shown below. In the past you had to crop the image to remove all of the white empty region. Now, with CS5, what you can do is after creating the panorama, flatten the image and then take your Magic Wand Tool (yes there is still value to that sucker), and select the white regions. Now, go to Select > Modify > Expand (set for 1 pixel), and finally bring up the Fill dialog to use Content Aware Fill. Here's another area where it can do amazing things.

[Note: since panoramas tend to be very large in size, you might find that you do not have enough memory to do this operation. One option is to decrease the size of the image (not the best solution). If your computer does not have much memory, you can fill in sections as opposed to trying to do it all at once. If your computer has more than 4 GB of ram, it's time to show off PS at 64-bit, restart and use the extra ram for good things.]

HDR Pro

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is intended to overcome the limited dynamic range inherent in cameras of all kinds. Simply, our eyes can see significantly greater dynamic range than a camera (film or digital) which is why when you take a photo in bright sunlight and a trees branch's shadow lies across the face of your friend, the final image shows the face of your friend is hidden behind a dark black band. For some time now, Photoshop has had HDR creation capability and all it did was to sell other people's HDR software. You have to keep in mind that to do full HDR image generation, you have to take (at least) three proto-HDR image where each image is 2 exposure stops from the next image using only shutter speed (NOT aperture) to vary the exposure. Then you need to take these images into Photoshop, combine to an HDR image and you will get an image that probably looks really bad. That's actually OK because at this point the image is a 32-bit image and your monitor or printer cannot properly display a 32-bit image. So what's needed to be done is to bring the image down to either 16- or 8-bits so that it can be properly seen. The conflict here is that the 32-bit image contains all of the dynamic shading capability that your eye can see, but once you bring it down to either 16- or 8-bit, most of that dynamic range will be removed. So the next step in the process is to alter the image by darkening the light regions of the image and lightening the dark regions of the image so that the global sense of the image is maintained while also trying to maintain the local contrast between each part of the image.

Confused? Don't be, but that's what the process of Tone Mapping is all about.

Anyhow, for years Photoshop's Tone Mapping capabilities were not good (I'm being very polite here.) Finally, with HDR Pro (that's Photoshop's new name for it), Photoshop's Tone Mapping capabilities are good to very good.

In the image set below, the top image is what you'd get if you composed the photo and pressed the shutter. The 2nd image below is what I got after processing the image into what I try to achieve with HDR: a valid representation of what I remember seeing of that scene. The bottom image is an example of what people often think of when they think of HDR, a grunge monstrosity. So, whether you want to make beautiful images or grunge monstrosities, you can easily do both with Photoshop's HDR Pro.

Before I leave this topic, let me also point out one area that Adobe has done a remarkable feat: ghost images in HDR photos. As stated, you need to take at least three images of the same scene with different shutter speeds. If the wind is not blowing and people are not moving, that's not too much of a problem. However, if winds are blowing trees around or people are moving in your scene, you've got ghosts because in each shot they will have moved somewhat. When you combine these, a little bit of each image will have a different view of that item. Probably the best feature in HDR Pro is a little check box in the upper left corner of the dialog where it says: "Remove Ghosts." Once you click on that, you then can click on the thumbnail of the proto-HDR image where you'd like for Photoshop to use that particular view of the moving item. As seen below, on the top is the first result of some people moving in the image from above. After clicking the Remove Ghosts check box and selecting the middle image I got the result on the bottom. I've been dealing with HDR photography for about 2 years now and this is amazing and wonderful.

Selections

Among things that are annoying, it's when a software company, say Adobe, removes a tool but doesn't provide anything to replace it. That's what Adobe did last cycle in CS4 when they removed "Extract" and provided nothing to replace it. Now, 18 months later they finally have replaced Extract with the new Selections capability. In a nutshell, a LOT of Photoshop is based on selecting part of an image. Anytime you want to remove Uncle Larry and insert Aunt Jody, you need to make selections. It was rough when Extract was removed in CS4 and it's a tremendous shame that we had to wait until CS5, but the new selections capability is good, very good.

Below is my official Selection Tester Image, my dog William (the wonder Corgi). I started off by using the Quick Selection Tool to make an easy quick selection. One of the limitations of the QST is that it can only make hard edges and can't do hair at all. Then I opened the "Refine Edge" option (originally introduced in CS4).

The new, and vastly improved Refine Edge window (shown 2nd image down) has two new and very important changes from the previous iteration: first off is the Edge Detection region. The larger the Radius selection, the "fuzzier" the edge will be. This is sort of like an increase/decrease softness to the edge, but it has to do with an increase/decrease detection of an edge rather than a softness of the entire edge. Another part of this section is the "Smart Radius" check box. When this is checked, there is greater self-sensitivity about what should be a hard or soft edge. Lastly, to the left of these things, is the "Refine Radius Tool." This provides a brush-like control that lets you paint where you want Photoshop to consider as part of the selection. [The dropdown option of the Refine Radius Tool" if the "Erase Refinements Tool" that removes your enhancements.] In the third image down you can see my brushing the region of William's eyelashes.

Below you can see a before-and-after view of the hairs on William's head showing on the left what I achieved using the Quick Selection Tool and on the right showing what I achieved using Smart Radius," "Refine Radius," and Expanding the Radius as well.

Another important tool in this new and improved Refine Edge window is the "Decontaminate Colors" option on the bottom. In the past, when you have a person standing against a strongly colored background, the outer ring of pixels of that person would also carry the background color. For years, the way that Photoshop dealt with that was to remove the outer ring of pixels of the selection. This was all well and good, but if strands of hair were being removed by that pixel removal, than the new selection features weren't of much value. What this does is to match the color of the edge with the color deeper in the selection. I'm sure this is done with the Content Aware technology mentioned earlier, it's brilliant and it works.

Puppet Warp

Puppet Warp is one of those things that at first looks like a cute gimmick, but later you start to realize that it has a number of interesting possibilities. A technology that was "borrowed" from After Effects, Puppet Warp lets you take any rasterized shape and twist it as if it were, well, a puppet. The key here is that you do have to have any object that you want to warp as a selection in its own layer.

The images below show a bit what Puppet Warp can do and for this image I did use two of the new features already mentioned above. As you would imagine, if you did select one of the totem poles below, even if you did place it on it's own layer, once you started puppet-ing the image, the original totem image would still be behind the puppeted image. So, here's what I did: I selected each totem pole, one-by-one, and placed them into their own layer. (I did use the newly updated Refine Edge and Edge Detection mentioned above.) Then I used Content Aware Fill on the original image to remove each totem pole from the original image. Finally, I selected each totem pole in turn by Command-clicking on each layer with a totem pole, Selected Puppet Warp from the Edit menu and that created a special grid pattern within the selected totem, from there it's a process of sticking pins into the totem pole which become the "handles" for dragging the image (similarly, where a pin is placed prevents movement of the image at that location and it becomes a fulcrum).

While the above image is "cute," I've seen Puppet Warp used for doing things like taking a long stem rose and tying it into a knot. Like most of these things, the limitation is your imagination.

Auto Lens Correction

The same engine that's in the Adobe Camera Raw lens correction is also in Photoshop. Wisely, Adobe moved the location of Lens Correction from Filter (menu) > Distort > Lens Correction to its own place under Filter, just under "Filter Gallery." Unfortunately, it's not as good as the one in ACR.

Below you see an original image and underneath that is the image after I clicked on AutoCorrect. If you look at the straight lines on the bottom of the image, it over compensated and I'm not completely sure what the problem here is and why this happened. One distinct advantage of ACR is that you can vary the amount of each correction (distortion, chromatic aberration, & vignetting), while in Photoshop, the correction is either on or off. [Note: this image is inside the atrium of the John Kennedy Presidential Library, a great place to obtain challenging images for image distortion (it's also a very good Presidential Library).]

Very disappointingly, the Geometric correction was OK, not good, while the Chromatic Aberration and the Vignetting was just plain bad. The good news is that the tab next to Auto Correction is Manual Correction and this works very well.

I'm not sure why Auto Lens Correction is so disappointing. Supposedly, all of these corrections are sensor agnostic. That is, they are supposed to provide the same correction for a 30D or 50D Canon body, the only difference is when you change lenses. This is important because Adobe has lens corrections for many lenses using the 50D and nothing for any of the other ##D bodies. Fortunately you can open JPEGs, TIFs, and (of course) raw images in ACR and do a better job of Auto Lens Correcting there.

Painting

For years the program Painter was THE application to go to when you wanted the look, action, and dynamic of painting in your computer. With this release of Photoshop, Painter has some serious competition. Brushes are not new to Photoshop, neither is using a Wacom tablet. However now Photoshop has new brushes and texture dynamics and features that are just, well, wow.

To better present what can be done, I've asked John Derry, long respected digital brush wizard if I could show one of his images, it's below. Whether you are painting freehand or using a photo as a cloning source (which John used for the image below), you will find new freedoms and opportunities that will amaze you.

To accomplish this, Adobe has added a new group of brushes (and brush dynamics) to their Brush Panel as shown below. As shown on the bottom below, you can see that instead of the cross-section view of each brush, they have a side-view of the brush that better shows how the brush will contact the "paper." In the upper left you see the widget that shows how your Wacom pen is angled and tipped against the pad. [Note: I'm using an Intuos 2, more recent Wacom tablets let you use the newest "Art Pens" that also indicate rotation. When you are using the new Art Pens with CS5, you can rotate a brush and see the changes in width depending on how it's being held.] To the right of that is my feeble wiggle showing a little bit of brush usage.

One of the limitations of this system is that while you can customize your brushes to the nth degree, maintaining them as such is not so easy or convenient. This can partially be resolved by saving your brushes as presets.

Besides saving your own presets, if you do not wish to reinvent the wheel, you might also consider going over to John Derry's website and purchase his set of Brushes, Actions, and Textures. Below you can see the various Brush Presets below. If you are interested, you can access these presets here. They are currently on sale for $19.95 and after this introductory price will increase to $24.95. Not only do you get the brushes, but there are also 6 excellent video tutorials to show you how to use them and the new brushes in Photoshop. If you are new to painting in general, or have significant experience in painting with real brushes and paint, these videos are worth the price of admission by themselves. John does an excellent job explaining how digital is different as well as demonstrate how well you can simulate real paint with digital. By the way, moments ago I mentioned that if you have the the Wacom Art Pen, CS5 will display how your brush is being held including any rotation. If you do not have an Art Pen, John has provided two complete sets of brushes: one that is good with the Art Pen, and one that provides the best options if you do not have the Art Pen. In every way, shape, and form, if you have PS-CS5 and have any smidgen of interest in using these brushes in any manner, this is a great deal that you should not skip.

MiniBridge

I lightly covered this in my Bridge review, but I do want to also mention MB here as well. MiniBridge is a somewhat ironic addition to Photoshop because what it returns image browsing back to where it once was in PS-CS. In PS-CS2 the Image Browser was removed and replaced with Bridge that was a separate application. Now it's back to provide immediate access to your images without having to leave PS. However, better than just being back, MB provides most of the interactive tools we've grown accustom to using in Bridge, we've got them here as well.

This is handy if you are working with many images, especially if you are making a collage or montage of many images. Additionally, if you are doing a presentation, you never have to leave PS.

There are two catches with MB, one is that Bridge MUST be running for MB to function. The other one, which is perhaps more limiting, is that in Bridge you can use the Filter Panel to look at only portrait images or images with a certain lens. In MB, you can only filter by ratings or labels.

Using MB should be done after working through the images in Bridge. That is, after opening a folder for the first time, you are likely to want to toss out the bad ones, place questionable ones in separate folders, do some ACR work on blocks of them, etc. These are all operations that can be done within MB but MB is not necessarily the most efficient place to do these kinds of things.

Once in PS, you can open the MB panel (accessed from the Windows menu > Extensions > (select) MiniBridge. Once opened, if you go to the Recent Folders (accessed either via the Navigation option (if opened) or from the icon of a clock with a down-facing arrow.

Note, as shown below, you can both Place images (currently MB is only available in ID or PS, so you can only Place in ID or PS), and you have access to all of the Tools for PS found in Bridge are also found in in MB as well.

Like all Panels, you can add it to any Workspace and when you do not need to access or view MB, it can be closed like any Panel. MB is very handy and a delightful addition (or return) to PS.

Repoussé

Repoussé is amongst the 3D features found only in PS Extended and brings in some features that people have been waiting (and begging) for from PS for many (many) years: 3D text as well as other extruded objects.

[Note: to Repoussé text, PS needs to rasterize the text. As such, it's always a good idea to duplicate the text and hide one of the copies on the possibility you might wish to go back and change some of the text. Unfortunately you cannot use Smart Object text with Repoussé.]

Below you see a bit of screen on the top and below that is the Repoussé window. From here you can do a tremendous amount of creativity (or damage depending on your artistic and/or creative abilities). Besides extruding text, you can add texture and/or images onto the the sides or front (and back) of the images.

Text is not all you can process via Repoussé: you can also use selections, paths, and Layer Masks. Below is a sample of a selection.

In short...

This is a milestone release. What we are seeing here with Content Aware Fill is sort of a completion of many years of development from such tools as the Spot Healing Brush (it sure seems to me that they share the same technology). Were this release just a few items here or there AND do the full conversion to Cocoa, we would have said: "wow, that's fantastic." But to do ALL of this and make the conversion to Cocoa is, well, amazing. Keep in mind that there are a number of other features I've come nowhere close to talking about (think HUD (Heads Up Display) of color selection for one), yes, there is more...

Despite all of the amazing new features, be advised that there are some strange glitches in this release (as if that's different?). Particularly, there are some aspects that run slow such as Liquefy. Or there are some strange screen flashes while performing various operations. Some crashing with some TIFFs, etc. You can look at John Nack's Blog here for some of the details.

If you use, need, or depend upon PS for fun or work, this is a release worth your time and money.

See:

• Overview - Adobe Creative Suite 5

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.