It seems like we are back here every few weeks with highlights of a new wave of Adobe® Creative Cloud™ features that benefit from AMD App Acceleration1. The pace is amazing and Adobe has done it again, taking the wraps off a slate of powerful, new features for Adobe Photoshop® CC users. Today also marks the release of all those great AMD accelerated Adobe Creative Cloud video workflow features announced at NAB 2014, including debayering for RED™ camera R3D media files, expanded support for Blackmagic Design camera formats, fast performance for new masking features, and the new time-saving master clip capability and more.

If you are a Photoshop CC user with AMD APU or GPU muscle in your PC or Mac (perhaps the new Mac Pro with dual AMD FirePro™ Professional Graphics!), then you are in for a fantastic experience. Thanks to the ongoing collaboration between AMD and Adobe, many of these incredible creative tools and time-saving workflow enhancements are designed to take full advantage of OpenCL™ for optimal performance that will keep pace with the speed of your creativity.

There is a lot to keep up with, but we are here to make sure that you have an insider’s first-look at what you can expect and how you can take advantage of these features in your daily work.

Blur Gallery is one of Photoshop’s best loved toolkits. Its palette of filters enables users to add remarkable dimension to their photos with photographic blurs that emulate the effect of focal length, aperture, distance, and other camera techniques. Now Adobe is expanding those options for Photoshop CC users with new motion blur filters that bring a palpable sense of action to still images.

Motion is one of the hardest things to duplicate. There are complex physics at play when a camera is in motion. Not long ago, this type of motion blur was too demanding to achieve practically with CPU-only computation. OpenCL changes everything, giving Photoshop CC the support of AMD graphics processing to make this powerful and much-desired effect come to life. The new Path Blur filter in Blur Gallery enables you to simulate motion along a path that you describe, with complete, fine control over the shape and the amount of blur. To put some perspective into the impact of Adobe’s optimization for AMD App Acceleration, Path Blur is up to 17 times faster2 on our new mobile AMD FX-7600P APU. In fact, we are seeing projects that take nearly 15 minutes to complete without AMD GPU-acceleration now taking just over 60 seconds3 on our new mobile AMD FX-7500 APU! Overall, we are seeing some great competitive results.

Tools that enable you to automatically select key elements within an image are vital to an efficient image processing workflow. You have long been able to select on factors such as color or shapes. Now, Adobe has introduced a Focus Area selection tool. Taking advantage of AMD App Acceleration for speedy analysis of your image, Focus Area quickly selects the in-focus area of a photo. After the initial automated selection, you can then modify the selection area as needed and make fine adjustments via a refine edge feature. This is a great time saver that reduces the tedium and time-consuming inefficiency involved in manual selection.

Everyone who works with images faces the dilemma posed when you want and/or need to upscale an entire image, or just a portion of an image. What will happen to the fine details at the new size? Will the results meet your requirements? Adobe engineers looked carefully at this subject and have dramatically enhanced the upscaling of images to better preserve details. This capability requires serious processing power. For the first time, this feature now harvests the immense power of AMD APUs and GPUs to accelerate the process.

Here we are also seeing great competitive performance – see below chart that shows some AMD Radeon™ results against NVIDIA. You can do your own quick web search on graphics card prices to get an even more impressive picture.

That’s not all. In another first, Photoshop CC now supports multiple AMD GPUs in the upscale process. This feature is liberating for the creative mind. Now you can recompose shots with the confidence that comes from knowing that you’ll have the details and sharpness you need quickly to make your image pop.

We are looking forward to seeing what AMD customers achieve with these new, powerful features. Let us know if you have an amazing experience to share!

Supporting Resources:

Clarice Simmons is a Senior Marketing Manager at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied

1 - AMD App Acceleration is a set of technologies designed to improve video quality and enhance application performance. Full enablement of some features requires support for OpenCL™ or DirectCompute (including AMD’s Unified Video Decoder (UVD)). Not all products have all features and full enablement of some capabilities and may require complementary products.

2 - Path Blur gets an incredible speed up of up to 17x on our new mobile AMD FX-7600P APU. AMD tests are performed on optimized AMD reference systems. AMD tests are performed on optimized AMD reference systems. PC manufacturers may vary their configuration yielding different results. Test project used the “Path Blur” feature of the beta version of Adobe® Photoshop® CC (June 2014 release), test image: 4032x6048, .arw format. A notebook PC with AMD FX-7600P APU with AMD Radeon™ R7 Series graphics, 4GB DDR3-1866RAM, video driver 13.350.0.0 - 10-Mar-2014, Window 8.1 build 9600, took 12 minutes 25 seconds with OpenCL off, 41 seconds with OpenCL on. KVN-72

3 - Path Blur gets an incredible speed up of up to 13x on our new mobile AMD FX-7500 APU. AMD tests are performed on optimized AMD reference systems. PC manufacturers may vary their configuration yielding different results. Test project used the “Path Blur” feature of the beta version of Adobe® Photoshop® CC (June 2014 release), test image: 4032x6048, .arw format. A notebook PC with AMD FX-7500 APU with AMD Radeon™ R7 Series graphics, 4GB DDR3-1866RAM, video driver 13.352.0.0 - 13-Apr-2014, Window 8.1 build 9600, took 14 minutes 46 seconds with OpenCL off, 62 seconds with OpenCL on. KVN-71

*Originally Posted by Clarice Simmons in AMD on Jun 19, 2014 8:02:59 AM