The 2016 release of Photoshop CC, confusingly dubbed version 2015.5, only adds a couple of new high-profile visual effects—Content-Aware Crop and Face-Aware Liquefy. The latest version instead focuses mostly on tweaking and strengthening existing tools, making improvements to collaboration, fonts, asset organization, and performance. The upshot is that, while this may not be the splashiest release, Photoshop remains unmatched in polish and capabilities among photo editing software.
If you haven't hopped aboard the Creative Cloud (CC) train yet, you've missed out on other recent feature additions, including Artboards, touch and stylus input support, the Design Space view, synced libraries, touchscreen support, a glyph panel, and lots more. Photographers can benefit from tools for haze removal and more navigation options. If you're serious about working with images, you need the latest version of Photoshop.
Get Going With Photoshop To get the latest version of Photoshop, you need a Creative Cloud subscription. This means you need to sign in with an existing Adobe ID or create a new one. The Photography plan is $9.99 per month, and that also gets you Photoshop Lightroom, our editors' choice for photo workflow software, and 10 Adobe Stock images. You can no longer simply buy a one-shot license for Photoshop, which has turned off some users who don't like the software-as-a-service model. Such people may want to consider options like CyberLink PhotoDirector, Corel Paintshop Pro, or even Adobe's own Photoshop Elements, all of which can be purchased outright. And if you don't want to pay a cent, you can use the free, open-source GIMP software, though doing so can be a painful, counterintuitive experience.
To install the application, you first install Creative Cloud, which handles updates and your online file syncing. It's also here that you find Adobe news, stock images, and the Behance creative social community.
You should only consider installing Photoshop CC 2015.5 on a fairly powerful PC or Mac. I installed it on an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 (the software runs on Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 or later). Installation took about 20 minutes. Right off the bat, I got a message saying that 3D editing wouldn't be available because of my video card or its driver. Would-be Mac users must be running OS X 10.9 or later.
Interface Photoshop's current start page shows thumbnails of your recent files and access to presets and libraries from the start page. The page also shows personalized tutorial content at the bottom. Those who'd rather stick with the starting experience they're used to can switch back to it later, but I find that the new start page makes it much easier to get to things I'm interested in, such as recent projects.
Adobe keeps making the Photoshop interface more customizable. You can choose from among several targeted workspace layouts, including 3D, Graphic and Web, Motion, Painting, and Photography, or create your own custom layout of panels and windows. You can even rearrange the program's toolbar button rail to taste. Photoshop's icons now sport the flat, 2D, non-skeuomorphic style that started with Windows 8, later landed in iOS 7, and has since become a widely adopted interface design standard.
The interface also adapts to the purpose at hand. A case in point is the new Select and Mask workspace, which is an available option whenever you have a selection tool active. This shows only the tools useful during selection, such as Refine Edge, Lasso, Brush, Hand, and Zoom, along with the relevant Properties panel.
Interface color themes are more consistent, too. If you set the window borders to be light gray, all dialogs will likewise be gray.
Photoshop is keeping up with the times in terms of touch input, such as that that supported by the Microsoft Surface Pro 4. Not only can you use touch to pan and zoom images, but Photoshop also recognizes gestures, such as a two-finger swipe to undo and a three-finger swipe to scroll through images. Larger tabs help touch-screen users, as do soft Shift, Ctrl, and Alt buttons. In version 2015.5, touch responsiveness was faster in my testing.
Tools for Photographers Though now it's packed with drawing and font tools, Photoshop got its start as a photo editing and printing application, and it remains the most powerful photo editing software there is. Along with its completely photography-focused sibling, Lightroom, Photoshop offers the most support for raw camera files, and the most in correction and effects. From removing or adding objects with content-aware tools to lens-profile-based geometry correction to histogram adjustments to stained-glass effect filters, Photoshop has it all. It's impossible to cover every feature here, but I'll take a closer look at a couple of the newer standout tools.
Content-Aware Crop. A few years ago, an app called Anticrop gained momentary celebrity in the tech world. Why? As its name suggests, it lets change you change the aspect ratio of an image by adding to the sides instead of simply cutting them off. The new Photoshop tool works similarly. Just check the Content-Aware box while using the crop tool, and anything in the crop selection outside your image will be filled in. It's really an extension of Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill tool. Like that tool, Content-Aware crop only works well with patterned image content, such as a forest, sea, or sky. It's particularly convincing with the latter. Note in the image below all the extra clouds generated in the sky on the right to create a more spacious square composition.
Face-Aware Liquefy. Face detection has reached an increasingly high level of accuracy in recent years, to the point of recognizing individual facial features as well as whole faces. Now Adobe is combining that technology with its powerful image-editing capabilities for some completely new features. Face-Aware Liquefy resembles what we first saw demonstrated by Adobe at Apple's iPad Pro launch event in the app called Adobe Fix. Face-Aware Liquefy tool lets you convincingly transform facial expressions, turning, for example, an RBF into a smile.
This brilliant tool finds facial features like eyes and mouth and gives you the ability to manipulate them with sliders for resizing the eyes, nose, face width, and jawline. You can apply some very flattering changes, or some ridiculously unflattering ones, as you can see in my test images. For me, the coolest part of this feature is that the resulting image still looks human. It's not like simply smearing a portrait with the old-fashioned, non-face-aware Liquefy tool. Note especially the added smile at lower left.
Camera-Shake Reduction. One of the hottest features of Photoshop CC is camera-shake reduction. The tool analyzes the photo to find the path of shake motion, and then aligns the shifted pixels. It sounds simple, but it's harder to get right than it may seem. This is because the path won't be the same everywhere in the photo unless you shook it exactly along a single plane—highly unlikely. You can use the tool's best guess, or select a region (or regions) in which you want the blur trace to be estimated.
You can also adjust Blur Trace Bounds, Smoothing, and Artifact Suppression—the last two let me create a less sharpened-looking result. I'd love to see a simple effect-strength adjustment like you get with Smart Sharpen (which, by the way, has a Reduce Noise slider). Shake Reduction is not a panacea, but it's definitely a finer effect than even the Smart Sharpen tool. If the subject is simply out of focus, it won't help you; a simply blurry subject won't be fixed.
Camera Raw Features. Photoshop CC benefits from several Camera Raw capabilities, including a geometry correction tool called Upright. This lets you fix parallel vertical and horizontal lines. Its Auto setting attempts to fix perspective errors, but you can choose to align only verticals or only horizontals, or mess with the perspective to taste with transforming sliders for pincushion/barrel distortion, vertical, horizontal, and aspect ratio.
You can even use Camera Raw as a filter, applying all its manifold photo adjustments—color temperature, exposure, geometry, all of it—to any image layer. You can apply Camera Raw adjustments to video, too, and use a non-circular healing brush. As in Lightroom, you also get a radial filter that lets you apply the adjustments to an oval shape, such as a person's head—very useful for highlighting that bit of anatomy.
The latest Camera Raw tool, Dehaze, is also shared by Lightroom. Open any photo, even if it's not in raw file format (I tried it on a mobile-phone JPG image), and this slider in the FX toolset does a pretty impressive job of removing—or adding—haze. Below, you can see the before and after (left to right) on a sample that's actually more glare than haze, but it still gives you an idea of what the tool does.
Mobile Design Photoshop has made great strides in the area of mobile design. Not only can you use views and tools intended to facilitate mobile and Web design, such as Artboards and Design Space, but you can also install the Adobe Preview CC mobile app and see how your project looks on it. When I installed the app on my iPhone 6S, I initially got a connection error. I was trying to connect by USB rather than Wi-Fi, though the Adobe documentation says the latter method should work, too.
The Design Space workspace presents a smaller, simpler tool set, and it is geared to working with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. A tutorial panel helps you get started with this interface option. In Design Space you can search and sample anything you work with, including colors, effects, fonts, layers, and your Library. What you don't get are the standard Photoshop photo adjustments and effects, but you can easily switch back to the standard Photoshop interface from Design Space.
Artboards let you create Photoshop documents with multiple views for different device screens. An Artboard can also be thought of as a level above layers. In fact, they're accessible from the Layers panel. It sounds a little dry, but after playing with Artboards for a while, I found it a useful capability.
Design Space uses Artboards by default. It also includes templates for current iPhones, iPads, Surface Pros, and other mobile-device screens. While I appreciate the thought behind these tools, I still expect it's going to be a hard sell for designers who are used to the full Photoshop interface. It does offer a streamlined way to work with multilevel layer content, though. It also lets you manipulate multiple objects at once, or easily swap their locations.
Libraries and Apps For a few years, Adobe has offered a way to sync content across multiple installations of the Creative Cloud apps, but the current Libraries feature takes this a step farther. Libraries sync not only documents, but also brushes, font styles, and color themes. And they can be created and accessed not only on the full Photoshop application, but also in mobile apps such as Capture CC, Hue CC, Photoshop Fix, Photoshop Mix, Photoshop Sketch, and Comp CC. The Adobe mobile apps support Libraries for acquiring, creating, or editing content. They're all free downloads, but most require a Creative Cloud account for full functionality.
New for libraries in the latest version of Photoshop is the ability to share a Library with anyone who has a Creative account. Also new is the ability to choose permissions for collaborators, limiting them to read-only rights or granting them full edit privileges.
Adobe Stock Adobe Stock, which emerged from Adobe's 2015 acquisition of Fotolia, is a repository of over 40 million images, vectors, illustrations, and video clips. Non-Creative Cloud members can still buy assets from Stock. Creators can also sell their assets and get a 33 percent cut of all sales. That's not bad, considering that the industry standard is 25 percent.
You can work within any Adobe desktop apps with Adobe Library support, including Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. The Search Adobe Stock menu choice opens the website, on which you can search for content and either download or sync it to your Creative Cloud Library. But you can also search Stock right in the Library panel and insert it into your image, where it will be watermarked until you license it. After you license it, it retains any edits you make.
You can either pay for image licenses one at a time, at $9.99 per image ($79.99 for unlimited use, including for resale products), or get a subscription. Options include 10 images per month for $49.99 and 750 images for $199.99 per month. Creative Cloud members can get the 10-image plan for a reduced price of $29.99 per month, and unused images roll over to future months.
Font Tricks
In the previous update, Adobe added the ability to filter searches for fonts with attributes like serif, script, and blackletter, and you can even tell the program to show you similar fonts to one you've selected. But now, the Type>Match Font… tool can actually identify fonts in images and find the closest match on your system or in Adobe's Typekit font store. Its intelligent imaging analysis isn't yet perfect, though, especially in cases where the font is at an angle, as you can see from the screenshot.
You can also designate fonts as favorites, which is particularly handy. Another nifty touch is the ability to hover over a font choice to see it previewed in your document. As you hover the mouse cursor over typefaces in the search panel, your selected text instantly switches to that typeface. The font size dropdown menu offers a 16-point option, a size commonly used for Web content.
Font fanciers who want to go even deeper than just standard typeface sets will love the Glyphs panel. This lets you substitute alternate characters, and even shows you those alternates when you select a character in a Type layer. The tool didn't always work reliably for me, though, sometimes proposing a previous letter when I selected a new one.
More Tools for Artists and Designers With higher-resolution displays becoming more common, your old images sometimes may not be good enough anymore. Photoshop CC's upsampling algorithm could be a lifesaver. The upscaler shows up when you resize an image, in the form of the Preserve Details resample setting. This also offers a Reduce Noise option, since the process may introduce noise. It's definitely clearer than the old bicubic algorithm.
Smart Objects make for non-destructive, reusable raster and vector images that update throughout your project. You can save formatting of type as styles that can be easily applied to other text later. You can also view type in a way that previews the antialiasing used in Web browsers. For Web designers, Photoshop CC can generate CSS code that produces the exact look designed in the software. Going in the other direction, the software can also import color from a website's HTML or CSS code.
Behance Behance is a social network for creative professionals, offering online portfolios and connections. It's built into all the Creative Cloud applications, letting users post projects for feedback from colleagues and clients. Users can post their files directly from Photoshop CC via a one-click share button. From Behance they can share and discuss the work and even connect with potential and existing clients and freelancers.
Behance's ProSites are customizable online portfolios, which Creative Cloud subscribers can use with their own URLs. Behance's presentation is elegant, clean, and incorporating all the essential social features du jour. I especially like that it offers statistics of your page activity. You can also export photos in Zoomify format—a powerful viewer that lets viewers zoom deep into large images. I'd like to see more sharing options, however, such as built-in email and Flickr sharing. Of course, you can do all this from Photoshop's ancillary Bridge image organizer app.
3D Tools and FuseYou no longer need to drop a cool grand to get Photoshop's 3D image editing capabilities in an Extended Edition, as they come with all Creative Cloud or Photography subscription plans. Adobe has also improved Photoshop's 3D tools, with faster performance and more realistic shadow rendering. Thankfully, Adobe offers downloadable sample 3D documents to get you started.
Working in the program's 3D mode is not for the faint of heart: It's practically rocket science, and indeed, you could design an actual rocket with it! The 3D Scene panel eases using it somewhat, though, as it consolidates many typical 3D design functions. You can create instances and duplicate 3D objects, which reflect any edits that you perform on the mother object.
3D printing has become a hot topic these days, and Photoshop's support for it continues to improve. The software can produce support beams and repair surfaces that wouldn't print correctly without them. Photoshop even shows color-coded 3D print previews and can export 3D models as PDF or SVX files, control bump-map depth, and automatically simplify 3D meshes. For the 2015.5 update, it adds support for 3D Manufacturing Format (3MF) files.
Adding to Adobe's 3D arsenal is the associated Fuse CC application, which, though a separate program, ties in neatly with Photoshop. Like a 3D game's avatar creator, Fuse lets you craft human forms and faces in minute 3D detail. In fact, it lets you customize a whopping 380 attributes of the human figure. Not only does it let you create faces and body shapes of infinite variety, but you can also apply clothing and texturing options. And once you create your faux humans, you can change their facial expression and posture, and then insert them into a Photoshop layer, animate them, and even print them in 3D.
Video Editing You can apply all of Photoshop's still image adjustments to video clips—including exposure, cropping, and filters. Photoshop is even capable of multitrack and keyframing, using the same fast rendering engine that powers Adobe's Premiere pro video editor. Only a few transition options are available, however, all of them variants of fades. Each video track you add becomes a Photoshop layer that can be individually adjusted.
You also get all the standard digital video editing tools, letting you join, split, and trim clips. Audio tools are minimal, but you can set an audio track's volume percent, fade it in, fade it out, or mute it. Movie files are saved as .PSDs, but by choosing File/Export/Render Video you can create a video file with H.264, QuickTime, or DPX encoding. You also get a decent choice of resolutions targeting both big screens and mobile devices, including 720p, 1080p, and 4K options.
Export Photoshop's Export options are richer than ever, and performance has been improved. The new Export experience replaces the tried-and-true Save for Web option (though you can still use that if you prefer). It's faster and it delivers smaller files, especially when it comes to JPGs. You can also export and import SVG (scalable vector graphics) files, commonly used on websites. The export options are vastly augmented, letting you export at multiple sizes simultaneously, convert to the sRGB color space, and export a single layer or Artboard. You can also set up a Quick Export choice from the File menu to use the format of your choice. Finally, you can add metadata such as copyright info at export. Beyond Mere Photoshopping Photoshop CC 2015.5 can do amazing things with digital images. The new Face-Aware Liquefy and Content-Aware Crop tools add to the program's unmatched collection of photo-manipulation tools. Furthermore, there are far more helpful tweaks and performance improvements in the latest version than I've outlined in this review. Integrated stock photography, advanced type tools, and organizational and syncing features such as libraries are also unique to the application. And Adobe also proves that it understands the move toward mobile and Web-focused design, along with the need for 3D tools. Photoshop's position as the preeminent image editing tool remains secure; it's a rare five-star product and our Editors' Choice for image editing software.
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Adobe Photoshop CC 2015
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