Photoshop turned twenty years old this year. That may seem like nothin' but a number, but when you look at the Mac platforms it's migrated to and from, and the fact that it's had 12 versions, Photoshop's twenty years have seen a lot of changes for one application. From System 6 on the Motorola 68000, it was then ported to PowerPC, then to OS X, then to OS X Intel, and now to Cocoa and 64-bit. All this while adding the features that make it the meaty image editor it is today. One look at the laundry list of major additions in CS5 makes it clear that Adobe isn't anywhere near done with the product. The new feature list is unrelenting:

Wet media brushes

Content-aware fill and heal tools

Improved masking/chroma keying

Camera RAW 6

Puppet Warp

Mini Bridge

Data-based lens distortion correction with custom lens profiling application

Local adaptation tone-mapping

Faster realtime 3D engine

Repoussé 3D features and HDR image-based lighting

New floating color picker and eyedropper

Of course, all of these features also appear in the Windows version, which has had 32- and 64-bit flavors since version CS4. Let's not forget that Windows 7 just came out as well, so Adobe's had its work cut out for it with this latest installment. I've been working with the betas and the release for a while now, so let's see how it all worked out.

Test Hardware

Mac Pro dual quad-core Nehalem Xeon 2.66 GHz 24GB RAM 120GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD system drive with separate HD RAID scratch disk Geforce GTX 285 / Radeon 4870 test scenarios Dual NEC WUXi 2490 Spectraview monitors OS X 10.6.3 running 64-bit kernel



MacBook Pro Core2 Duo 2.4GHz 15" Santa Rosa 4GB RAM 120GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD NVIDIA Geforce 8600M 256MB OS X 10.6.3 running 32-bit kernel



System Requirements

Windows Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor



Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 3; Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (Service Pack 2 recommended); or Windows 7



1GB of RAM



1GB of available hard-disk space



1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM



DVD-ROM drive



QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for multimedia features



Broadband Internet connection required for online services

Mac OS Multicore Intel processor



Mac OS X v10.5.7 or v10.6



1GB of RAM



2GB of available hard-disk space for installation



OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM



DVD-ROM drive



QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for multimedia features



Broadband Internet connection required for online services*

Updated Tools and Adjustments

As I mentioned above, CS5 is loaded with new features, but there are some significant tweaks to the existing toolset to cover first. One small thing that a lot of people will appreciate is that you can now drag and drop smart objects into images directly. It's a handy little addition, especially if you are working between Illustrator and Photoshop, where you want to keep vector images as smart objects.

Hue Strip and Sampling Ring

With the new painting tools in CS5 came the need for quicker, interactive color adjustments and a better color sampler. The first of these additions is the Sampling Ring that's been added to the eyedropper. When you click a color with the eyedropper tool, a circular thing pops up that looks a bit like the manual focus ring on a camera:

The top half on the inside is your clicked sample and the bottom half is the active color before sampling. The grey ring on the outside is a neutral gray strip to show against your color. Some people might find the ring intrusive (it's pretty big), but it's definitely an upgrade over the Toolbox swatch, which looks anemic in comparison. This also lets you work on a fullscreen document with everything hidden.

In a similar "don't make me use a dialog for something essential" vein, the new Hue Strip is a pop-up color picker that complements the new painting features well. Control-option-command click in your image and you'll get a quick pop-up interface for selecting color:

Just looking at it pretty much explains its usage: slide to change the hue at the right, and pick a tint/shade in the block to the left. It's pretty bare bones, but it gets the job done nicely.

Interactive brush improvements.

Another small but significant change to the brushes in CS5 is the improved control-alt brush popup. This GPU-accelerated brush tip preview was added in CS4, and CS5 adds the ability to change brush softness as well as size. While holding control-alt, drag up/down for softness and left/right for size:

If you drag at a perfect 45-degree angle, nothing will happen to the brush shape, but your head could explode from the confusion of watching your cursor do nothing while the mouse moves. So be careful with that.

Scrubby zoom

One of the "you'll either love it or hate it" additions in CS5 is scrubby zoom. This is a new zoom behavior that works a lot like zooming in a 3D application: pick a spot and drag while clicking and you'll get closer to the spot clicked:

I'm not really a fan of it myself—I find it slower and harder to frame what I want to see than with the marquee—but I'm sure it will have its share of users. My only real complaint is that it's on by default. Existing Photoshop users are going to wonder what happened to their command-spacebar zoom, not realizing they have to select the zoom tool explicitly (something many never do) to change it back to the old behavior. Yes, we Photoshoppers live trying lives.