Today is April 12, the very same day that Adobe announced that it would be launching its brand new CS5 line of products, featuring revamps of all of its included products. Whilst the official launch has yet to come (it's scheduled for 11AM PDT), the company has unveiled a huge number of the features which will be shipping with the product in the very near future.
CS5 brings a number of performance enhancements, particularly for the OS X platform, where Photoshop, for example, will be 64-bit. There are too many changes in this respect to list, considering there are features to go through, so we'll leave that as is and preview some of the new improvements below.
Photoshop:
Photoshop CS5 features the much-anticipated Content Aware Fill feature, allowing you to select a region which you'd like to remove from any given photo and then have the software intelligently dispose of it promptly. A good video demo of the feature can be found on YouTube. Kevin Connor, vice president of product management for professional digital imaging at Adobe, stated, "The past two decades have demonstrated an amazing interplay between customers who want to push the limits of their personal creativity and a passionate team of Adobe engineers who make those visions a reality. We experienced this firsthand when we posted a 'sneak peek' video of the team's work on the Content Aware Fill feature a few weeks ago. It quickly became the number one viral video online, with close to 2 million views... this version of Photoshop has some of the most innovative and extraordinary technologies to ever come from our labs and clearly customers are already clamoring for it."
The Camera Raw 6 plugin will now support over 275 models of cameras, great news for photographers who do a lot of editing in Photoshop. In addition to this, you'll be able to use Puppet Warp, a feature that allows you to select certain parts of an image, and then move it around easily, with Photoshop adjusting the rest on the fly. You can find a good example of this here.
Automatic lens correction is available in Photoshop CS5, another feature which will no doubt save photographers a great deal of time. There are too many features to mention, but expect to hear a lot more about them in the coming weeks.
Illustrator:
Illustrator CS5 boasts a new Perspective Grid, allowing artists to create images in 1, 2 or 3 point perspectives. Those who also work with Flash Professional CS5 can move their projects between the two pieces of software quickly and easily, an ability which will save a lot of time for those who use the two tools often.
Bristle Brush is a feature that allows people to create realistic brush strokes, similar to paintbrushes in real life. Adobe CS Review, an online feature of Adobe's, will allow people to share and upload their projects from directly within Illustrator. Again, there are a huge number of features in the CS5 version of Illustrator, so we can't list them all, but feel free to check out the embedded video below.
Flash Professional:
The new Flash Professional features the ability to, as you may have heard, export projects to an iPhone compatible format. This won't be much use as it stands, as Apple has forbidden apps of this nature from its store, but perhaps this may change in the future (keep in mind that it's very, very unlikely). This isn't the only new feature, of course; those using Flash Professional will now be able to use the new code snippets panel, where designers can select code to insert into their current application, helping to remove the tedium of repetitive tasks.
The new Text Layout Framework adds very rich typography features in over 30 languages, aiding with layout and other features, providing a huge amount of help to those who deal with a lot of text in Flash. As we've mentioned multiple times, there are many more new additions than this, too numerous to list, so we'll stop where we are.
Adobe design evangelist Terry White posted videos on a range of CS5 products a few days ago, which we'll embed below. According to Macworld, the pricing for some of the CS5 products will be as follows:
- Photoshop: $699 new (Standard, $999 Extended), $349 upgrade.
- Illustrator: $599 new, $199 upgrade.
- Flash Professional CS5: $699 new, $199 upgrade.
If you're after information on the improvements to other applications, check out Adobe's site here.
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