The New Adobe Photoshop CS5. A Must-Have.

Photoshop started out on the Mac, and Windows usersstared at it with suspicion and longing all the way up toversion 2.5 when prosaic Windows users were finally allowed on board. Those were exciting times . But that was nearly 10 versions (and twenty years) )ago; today, Adobe comes out yet again with a major upgrade, CS5. Let's check out some of the greatest new features on Adobe Photoshop CS5. They might just be reason enough for your piggy bank to quake on its shelf yet again.

CS5 is a real version iteration. It isn't something they put out just to mark time. Adobe puts CS5's improvements over the features on CS4, at 250. As staggering as that number is, I've zeroed down on four specific features in the latest Adobe Photoshop, that should really knock your socks off. The first one up is an addition to the Transformation toolbox, colorfully named the Puppet Warp tool. What it does is, it lets you pick up the picture of a figure, and lay down the point where you would like it to be able to move - knees and elbows, for instance. Once you do that, Photoshop, based on the joint points you've put in, helps you bend, twist and rotate parts of the figure in the most realistic fashion possible.

But Adobe Photoshop is basically a photo manipulation tool. It was CS4 that saw the first version of the Refine Edge Tool for photo artists, and it was greatly appreciated. CS5 picks up where the last version left off, and does a fantastic job of improving on a very useful idea. The problem with the first Refine Edge Tool was that it could be very difficult to take every little detail of a picture into account with the Quick Select. If you have leaves or hair to select, you could be at it all day drawing a line around everything. CS5 changes all of that. You just need to Quick Select the part of the picture you're interested in, and adjust the Radius in the Refine Edge function. Photoshop fires up its Smart Radius function, and figures out on its own which the soft edges are, and makes the changes you need intelligently.

Content Aware Fill has been the most awaited feature on Adobe Photoshop CS5. And it's for good reason too. The intelligence of the technology they've used seems truly space-age, and it should save you no end of time - even if you are a newbie. The name is pretty self descriptive - if you cut out a part of a picture, you don't want a white hole where the cut-out portion used to exist - you want the background show through. Past versions used to have a Spot Healing tool to do the job, although it was kind of laborious, and took extra time with repair tools like Blur, Dodge and Clone Stamp. The new algorithm though is hysterically intelligent. It looks for parts of the background that would go well in the hole, makes acomposite of all of them, and fills it up on its own. You can erase a tree in a park, and Content Aware Fill will right away put grass and sky where the hole used to be.

And lastly, a feature, High Dynamic Range, that earlier versions of Adobe Photoshop struggled with and lost to competition like PhotoMatrix at, is a strong contender with CS5. This version has two kinds of HDR - Pro and Toning. It should put the Photoshop name back at front and center. CS5 has so many new features, you could probably spend years exploring and building your skills on them. You'll have to buy the package to really learn though, and that's something to look forward to.