Photoshop CS6 and Natural Needs

Hello.
Having read and seen enough videos and other promotional materials for Photoshop CS6, I felt understatement and decided to test it myself.
Since I do not understand the point of creating specially tailored examples to demonstrate new features, we will test them on daily needs, namely:

1) Photo manipulations
2) Working with the interface (website and mobile application)
3) Typography
4) Creating illustrations and vector
UPD 1 chips : A little testing of performance and stability.

So let's go.

Have you seen a cat upstairs?
It is such a typographic kote that seems to have become the new starting beauty of Photoshop CS6, at least in the beta version.
I was a little confused by the Superstition inscription instead of the expected Photoshop, but only a little, because immediately after that I had a much greater reason for embarrassment: I need an Adobe ID, otherwise no one is going anywhere.

Total, at startup and immediately after - the first impression:

1) We need an Adobe ID, which, incidentally, was required during installation, but there you could skip it, but here it wasn’t. True, I already had it installed in Adobe Editions and Photoshop even tried to pull it automatically, but it didn’t work out - I entered it with my hands.
2) Apparently, as a reward for some dances with this same ID, you get not 30 (as in CS5), but 60 days of the trial period , but a bonus in the start window in the form of useful links on youtube - reviews, online help, etc. .d.
. Reminds 3D Max with their lessons.
By the way, the online help at the time of writing the review was not available.
3) It is really faster. Both in loading, and in work.
4) It is dark. But this is fixable, since there are 4 color schemes for the interface to choose from.



5) By default, the interface profile is sharpened for 3D. I think this is because he is the first in the list of profiles in alphabetical order, but Photoshop is still basically not for this. Although, judging by the development of this tool, more and more integrate modeling and management of simple and not very three-dimensional objects.
6) When CS6 is running, Photoshop CS5 does not start. That is completely. Instead, the sixth starts. A session of simultaneous love game work like a couple of CS5 + CS3 will not work.

What immediately caught my eye: the Timeline at the bottom of the window, with the Timeline very similar to the greetings from AfterEffects, even the layer filters are the same.

Naturally, I could not resist and tried to throw a random avi-file there.
My friends, it wasn’t there. I saw the audio track, the video - no. Apparently, we will deal with bitrates later.
By the way, the animation panel is also built in there. I expected to see another hello, already from Flash, but no - a simple frame-by-frame for gif-animations.

But it's time to switch to more familiar profiles for working with graphics.

And what do we see?

Separate profile with new. Conveniently, what is already there.
You are immediately hinted at where and what to look at first.
And we’ll see, for that we have gathered.
By the way, what I liked immediately when preparing the screenshots was: the
new mechanism of the Crop tool (Crop) .
Firstly, immediately when choosing a tool, a frame appears along the border of the image, which is convenient to pull and at the same time, the old mechanism of stretching from a given area has not been removed. Secondly, you can track the appearance of the frame before and after cropping in the process. In general - pleased.

I tried on groups of large images. Compared to CS5 - significantly faster and crop, and move. On a working computer, this is not so noticeable (after all, 16 gigabytes of RAM and core i7 make themselves felt), but on a laptop it is noticeable.

Looking ahead, I’ll say: most of all this is felt on 3D modeling. True, the problem with not very high-quality export of polygonal models has not been fixed - fragments are sometimes lost.

But, in order:

Useful for everyone:

1) In my opinion, the absolute leader in the ranking: AutoSave . The end to third-party straying and writing your own actions for Avtosave. Now you can customize it culturally.

2) Search by layers. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be just a bomb, especially for working with interfaces.
You can search and sort by:
- type of layer,
- attribute,
- mode,
- name,
- applied effect, etc.

A lot of opportunities, in particular, both in automation and in accelerating work (especially in making changes).
Search filters can be applied either individually or several at a time.
Example:Do you have a website or interface layout in which you need to globally change the style of the font or buttons.
Open it and sort the layers, say by type: Text.
Then try another new product from CS6: Paragraph Styles . We click, and all the texts in our new form.

By the way, remember this annoying allert: "Could not commit / move ... because the layer is locked"?
So when filtering layers, the search for this gaddy locked layer takes 5 seconds.

I experienced similar feelings when in CS4 it became possible to open images not in windows, but in tabs.

3) Paragraph Styles and Character StylesI described the most interesting in the previous example, but we will dwell on the new font settings when viewing typography. I can only say that it works especially well in combination with preliminary filtering of layers by type.

4) The new mechanism of Crop (Crop) . See above. And be sure to try setting it up. Straighten is a curious thing.

5) Ctrl + J. Now it works not only on the layer, but also on the group. As far as I can remember, the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl + Shift +,” was configured for the same purpose.

6) Create clipping mask.Now it works not only on the layer, but also on the group. It helps a lot with photo manipulations and drawing - no extra masks are needed. (A question arose, therefore I will clarify: an object can be “clipped” to a group, on the contrary, it is not yet possible without covertation to Smart Object.)

7) Floating tooltip: this is almost a replacement for the Info panel. At least with operations such as selection, cropping, positioning, so exactly.


Photomanipulations:

1) Camera Raw 7. There are no comments. Waited? Waited. You can describe in detail a whole article. From the most pleasant: Highligts / Shadows / Whites are edited with curves, and in general there are much more settings. That is, now even without direct loading in Photoshop you can do a lot of good.

2) Iris Blur Filter. Well, what can I say: Akvis is, of course, not so relaxed, but FocalPoint is worth thinking about. A little more settings would be great. So far, just very good.
I will not describe in detail - I’ll better show:

And this is one click with the basic settings. Not bad, right? With the effect of a photo lens can not be compared, of course, but in my opinion, not bad.

3) Filter “Tilt Shift”. Essentially the same thing, but not radial blur, but in straight lines. It’s very convenient, by the way the interface of the filter itself is thought out, it is easy to achieve precise settings even with the mouse.


4) New nyashechki in Mini Bridge. I won’t be in detail, but subjectively: everything is twice as fast.

Work with the interface.

1) The layer filter (described in detail above) will raise the Jedi skills when working with multiple screenshots and groups of layers simultaneously to a new level.

2) Floating hint (also described above). Especially convenient when setting the rulers - you can immediately see where you are and where you are.

3) There are templates for popular mobile interfaces (smartphones and tablets).


Here explain to me: What was worth signing them? At least tentatively? At least basic?
Offhand I recognized only the iPhone (Retina and not Retina), basic Android (smart and tablet) and Blackberry.
The rest is a mystery.
And most importantly: I have not found anywhere in the settings how this can be signed independently. You can, of course, create your own preset and sign there, but “Why then?” (c)

Typography:

1) The ability to custom create style libraries for Paragraph Styles and Charachter Styles.

2) Added a lot of font settings.



As we can see, along with standard kerning, tracking, and leading, we get a lot of new ones, for example, the same Contextual Alternates. For non-printers, this is something like this:


Well, the most delicious, finally.

Creation of illustrations and vector chips

1) A lot of things were added to default-sets.
New Shapes in a standard set, with a hint of abstraction.
New brush presets, in which the effort to improve the quality of work with the tablet is very clearly visible. And rightly so, I think.

2) Dotted contours of objects . Yes. They are here. They came.
That's just the wrong move. After reading about such a chip, I was one of the first to climb it to look for it. Where do you think?
Correct: in the styles of the layer, and more specifically Stroke (Contour). As you probably already guessed, no one was waiting for me there, besides the standard solid contour, so I had to study the materiel in-depth.

They were found right here:


In the shape settings.
There you can play with rounding the corners, the location of this stroke (inside, in the center, outside), the outline, size, etc. In general: we forget about the text hatch going along the Shape.
And an interesting effect: the use of this circuit does not cancel the standard Stroke. You can achieve interesting results, in particular a double circuit with a gap.
In general, Shape was thoroughly modified (I think it was lobbied by typesetters who didn’t have Illustrator installed so that vector designers would also work in Photoshop), starting from the fact that now you can quickly and beautifully play with fill in the Shape panel and ending with the Shape thumbnail in the layer panel now shows not just a colored square and a vector layer mask next to it, but a full-fledged picture.

To summarize the first acquaintance with Photoshop CS6.

Pros:

• Significantly accelerated work.
• The trial period doubled.
• Added a lot of new and interesting chips. Both incredibly useful, such as auto-save and search by layers, and simpler, like an improved thumbnail for Shape and new brush presets.
• We began to slowly adapt the general orientation of the program to create an interface design (document preparation, floating Info tips and outline strokes for forms).
• Seriously pumped the focus of the program for photographers and 3D - modelers.
• Created new typography mechanisms (font and text style libraries)

Minuses:

• Categorically and for quite some time now, there is not enough opportunity to apply one filter to a group of layers. Why is that? After all, copying has already been done for this, and the use of style, and even clipping mask. But the filter still.
• Little has been done for interface designers. In my opinion, it would be very useful to add basic presets for interfaces to the standard shape library (a la Balsamiq).
• Smoothing fonts. Only I miss the ability to smooth a la browser? IE, Mozilla and Opera - smoothing immediately seriously reconciled designers and layout designers.
• There is no way to run simultaneously with an older version of Photoshop.
• Nowhere could I find the price of the product and its localized versions.
• Online help does not work.

Conclusion: if the price is more or less decent, then you need to take it.

And finally, I tested the new speed, shape options and a couple of new brushes when creating these guys:


UPD 1:
After reading the comments from the category: “But my hellishly buggy / slows down / crashes”, I decided to conduct a three-hour design test drive.

Initial: 8 independent computers are involved, of which

• 4 inpatients (3 PCs and 1 Mac)
• 4 laptops (2 PCs and 2 MacBooks - Air and Pro)

What we found out:

1) Strangely enough, the most unstable Mac, although it would seem.
Pro, of course, behaved more decent than a lightweight fellow, but on 4 gigs of RAM it significantly slowed down for Paragraph Styles and Bridge (which was not noticed before).
After two hours of active work, Air got stuck tightly and took off. The owner of the laptop was clearly experiencing a cultural shock, because, in his words: “This has never happened before!” The Makovsky desktop monoblock was more active, but in Paragraph Styles it also did not behave particularly well, and in 3D it showed very low results.

2) PC is a little better. Naturally, there were precedents for disabling the GPU - acceleration in the process of working with 3D, and with style libraries, not everything is fine. At some stage, suddenly the voluminous sources that previously flew opened up longer. A funny incident happened to one of the laptops: in the process, the anti-virus database suddenly began to update, which in the final demolished the Adobe ID, which led to the need to re-register Photoshop and for some reason reset the user settings.
But then, in revenge, apparently, this laptop with hybrid graphics tore to shreds of its stationary counterpart with more than a decent discrete video card of 1 GB in speed of applying packet styles.

Total: minimally decent results with the active work of Photoshop CS6 issued on:

• PC
• Core i3 (and 2 Duo proved to be even worse than Duo, which surprised us incredibly)
• Windows 7 x 64
• RAM: 8 GB
• Graphics Card 1 GB

By the way, it was a laptop.