Top 5 Little known features in Photoshop CS5

21. Jun, 2010 1 Comment

It doesn’t get any better for photoshop users than upgrading to Adobe Photoshop CS5. A lot has been added in the Version 12.0. In fact there are a lot of surprises for all you Photoshop Fans. Given below is just a sneak peak into the newly added features in Ps CS5. Almost all the new additions in this upgrade are practically usable and extremely functional. So lets get familiar with DPX’s Top 5 showstopping features and begin revolutionizing images editing once again

Mini Bridge

When we used to use photoshop 7 , we had a thing call File Browser. Then after the introduction of the Creative Suite , we saw the File Browser turn in to an independent application called Bridge. Although the main purpose of the bride was to bridge the files between various adobe applications , we still felt the absence of an application inside photoshop, which could be easily accessible instantly like the file browser. With the release of CS5, Photoshop now has an inbuilt panel of the bridge call the Mini Bridge. It contains most of the common functionality which we use if we were inside the main application.

New and Improved Refine Edge.

Completed in about 3 minutes

Our study shows that, more than 93% of the intermediate level photoshop users skip a beat when they are asked to mask hair and fur. Out of which 50% have never got accurate results of masking hair till date. When we tried out the new refine edge feature in Photoshop CS5, we go to see some extraordinary results. With features like Color Decontamination, removing the occasional color cast is like blowing a feather.

Content Aware Fill

The fill command ( Shift + Delete ) now has a new feature call Content Aware Fill along with the other option of 50% Grey. This command does the fill command inside any selection you’ve made and instead of filling it with a color, it fills it with the image itself. Now the fill isn’t just a vague random fill of the image but an almost precise image rendering fill which photoshop calculates by looking at the immediate and the not so immediate surrounding of the selection. Now sometimes you may get a result which you are looking for but sometimes may be about 95% close to the result. But if you look at it from the spot healing or clone brush point of view, it an amazing replacement tool. We felt that this tool works best if you have a textured background, grass, sand, skin, roads and other images with continuity which otherwise would have been a Herculean task to do with a clone stamp or healing brush.

New 3D Features

If you are a Photoshop CS5 Extended users , then you can now use the 3D feature in a whole new way. This new feature is called the Repousse ( Rah-Poo-Zay). This feature not only allows you to easily create 3D extrusions, inflations and different kinds of bevels, but it also pops up your text logos , other paths, layer masks and selections in a way you’ve never seen before. And for the 3D Pros, the 3D retrace rendering is a lot faster. Not to mention the realistic shadows, 3D Depth of Field, as well as applying a texture on the 3D objects, are some of the new features included.

Puppet Warp Tool

Here comes the father of Liquify, Warp Tool, and Free Transform. Stretching and Bending pixels could never get easier and faster without the Puppet Warp Tool. With minimal distortions , you can play around with your images for some cool and crazy results. Its like your images is made with infinite rubber pixels. After selecting the Edit>Puppet Warp Tool, just drop the pins at the right places and areas where you want the stretching and bending to happen and just push or pull each or multiple pins ( shift select for multiple points). After you are satisfied with the result , just hit the enter key to finalize the warping.