The photographic community is well used to product launches. Barely a week goes by without a must-have camera, lens or other accessory making an appearance. But nothing excites quite as much as a new version of Photoshop. Whatever hardware you may use to capture your photographs, it’s likely that they’re polished in the world’s most popular image-editing application.

Photoshop CS5 brings many enhancements, new tools and new ways of working. As with earlier releases, it’s available in two flavours: the standard edition, containing almost all the tools you’re likely to need, and an Extended edition that includes not just scientific, animation and measurement tools, but a powerful 3D modelling engine that just got a whole lot better.

Better, faster cutouts
Users of earlier versions of Photoshop will value the combination of the Quick Selection tool and the Refine Edge dialogue, which allows you to make rapid selections of people and other objects, easily extracting them from complex and busy backgrounds. CS5 takes Refine Edge a significant step further, with the introduction of a new Edge Detection tool within the dialogue.

This is a variable-sized brush that you can drag over soft and detailed areas of an image, such as a model’s hair or the fur on an animal, and Photoshop will automatically separate the foreground from the background in a realistic, intricate manner. In many cases, this kind of instant cutout is the holy grail of image processing: it works perfectly on most kinds of images, and can be comprehensively adjusted by the user to produce stunning results.

The Refine Edge dialogue has undergone some additional tweaking. You can now use shortcuts to switch between your views of the cutout, with simple single-character key presses – B for a black background, W for white, L to show underlying layers, R to reveal the original layer intact, and so on. A new Decontaminate Colours option allows you to correct a common cutout problem: colours from outside the cutout area leaking into soft, anti-aliased cutout edges. A check box and slider control the degree of decontamination.

Finally, Refine Edge gives you the option of outputting your cutouts in several ways: as a selection, as a new layer, or as a new layer with a layer mask. This last option makes it easy to customise a cutout further, as unwanted areas are hidden rather than deleted, so you can tidy up edges as required.

Instant fills
One of the biggest new tricks Adobe has unveiled is Content-Aware Fill. The groundwork was laid in CS4, which brought Content-Aware Scaling – a method of changing the aspect ratio of images that preserved foreground detail intact, while squeezing or stretching the background. The new technology in CS5 has the ability to patch an area of an image with colours and textures sampled from the background to an extraordinary level of sophistication.

The system works in one of two ways. You can make a selection with the Magic Wand, or any selection tool, and use the Shift-Delete shortcut to bring up the standard Fill dialogue. Choosing Content-Aware Fill will fill the selection with a seamless rendition of the background, patching it instantly as if it were never there. Alternatively, you can use the Content-Aware mode of the Spot Healing Brush to paint over an object, and it will vanish. This method is ideal for taking out telephone wires, stray hairs, wrinkles and other fine detail blemishes.

Although it’s certainly impressive, Content-Aware Fill rarely produces perfect results first time. There’s usually an amount of manual patching and correction that needs to be done to complete the task. But it takes a lot of the donkey work out of removing unwanted picture elements, leaving you with only the most minor corrections still to perform.

Organic warping
Although Image Warp presents you with a 12-point grid that can distort an image or cutout into just about any shape, the system is hard to control and can easily produce unwanted and clumsy-looking results. The new Puppet Warp tool is the ideal way to create subtle modifications in the position of an animal, or a hand, or the pose of a model’s limbs, and it’s both powerful and easy to use.

Choosing Puppet Warp produces a fine grid of triangles over the object’s surface. Clicking on this grid places marker pins, and it’s generally necessary to place two pins first to mark static points – such as the shoulders and rump of an animal. When you place further pins, you can drag them to move a head, or a leg, or a tail: the selected body part can be moved smoothly in any direction, and the join to the rest of the body will bend in a natural, organic way to accommodate the change.

Puppet Warp is a hugely useful technology. Performing tasks such as changing the pose of a model’s hand would previously have involved a lot of cutting, pasting and patching; now you can simply drag the fingers to the position you want them in. Further controls allow you to rotate around each pin, and to move pins up and down in the stacking order – which means that if you bend an animal’s head over its leg, you can choose whether you want the head to appear in front of or behind the leg in question.

HDR and Camera Raw
Photoshop’s ability to combine multiple images to create a High Dynamic Range (HDR) composite enables you to select the best exposures from multiple sources to build the perfect image. HDR Pro makes the process that much easier, with greater control over the way images are merged, allowing you to adjust tonal values and to select from a range styles for final output. An innovative “de-ghosting” technology removes unwanted elements that appear only on one frame of the composite image. If a flower, for example, blows in the wind in just one frame, it will be removed from the final mix.

You can choose from a variety of presets to try out different common HDR styling solutions, and save your preferred options as presets so you can then apply them to a range of images. It’s even possible to treat a single-layer image as if it’s in HDR mode, allowing you to bring some of the hyper-realism of HDR to single shots – although this is a tricky area, and one that needs handling with due caution.

Camera Raw, the dialogue that imports raw files directly from supported cameras, has had a range of useful enhancements with this version. We finally get noise reduction built in, with separate controls for luminance and colour noise. These take the form of two simple sliders, with a separate control for colour detail; but when you start to move the luminance noise slider, you activate two new sliders – detail and contrast – for the luminance as well. This approach doesn’t have the sophistication of, say, Neat Image or Noise Ninja, but it is a long-awaited step in the right direction. And for those who find their images just too smooth after noise reduction, there’s now the opportunity to add artificial grain back into the image, with separate controls for amount, size and roughness.

Improved post-crop vignetting controls have now been hived off into the “fx” section of the dialogue, separating it from lens vignetting, with an additional control to restore highlights from darkened corners. You can now save your favourite vignettes as presets, enabling easy application to a range of images.

Lens correction
The Lens Correction dialogue now opens to the new Auto Correction mode. Here you can specify the make and model of your camera, as well as the specific lens used, and Photoshop will use its database to produce a standard correction for geometric distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting to suit that combination. With the Adobe Lens Profile Creator, available from Adobe as a separate free download, users can build custom profiles for their lenses that will in turn become part of a wider searchable database of lens types. The software comes with a set of calibration charts, which you photograph yourself. Loading this image into the Lens Profile Creator will then generate a profile automatically.

A new Custom tab contains all the manual controls, with a default option to automatically scale the image to fill the frame when distortions are applied.

Third dimension
The 3D modelling tools in the Extended Edition of Photoshop have had a huge upgrade with this release, with several striking new technologies that make the creation of 3D artwork easier than ever before.

Repoussé is a term used by metalworkers to denote three-dimensional relief created by hammering metal from the reverse side. In Photoshop, the Repoussé tool is the key to the immediate creation of 3D models from any artwork. Make a selection, and Repoussé can extrude it to produce items such as a box or 3D lettering, or revolve it to create vases, bottles, or any object that could be created on a lathe. With a high degree of control over bevels, twists and tapers, it’s possible to build a wide range of objects from scratch: and you can add textures to each face of each object, either by applying existing photographs or by painting directly onto the 3D surface.

Repoussé also has an “inflate” mode, which allows you to treat a cutout photograph as if it were a balloon skin, and then pump virtual air into it. The result is that you can instantly make a photographic 3D object from photographic sources: a photograph of a beetle can be turned into a solid insect that can be viewed from any angle, for instance.

The 3D rendering process, previously a weakness in Photoshop, now produces high-quality, photographic results, thanks to the new Adobe Ray Tracer (ART) engine, which produces a progressive render that we can pause or terminate at any point, allowing you to produce quick checks for accuracy and texture without committing to a long render time. You can set the depth of field for 3D models, allowing them to blur out of focus as they recede into the background. The introduction of Image Based Lighting means that when you place a 3D model in an existing scene, you can use that scene to create the lighting and reflection conditions that make the model look truly as if it occupies that space. A new Shadow Catcher allows you to set a ground plane, and the image will cast a realistic shadow on that plane.

Added extras
Photoshop has implemented some of the technology found in Painter in its new brush engine, which uses multi-fibre, individually moving strands to simulate the movement of oil paint and watercolour brushes. With control over the relative dryness and stiffness of each brush, and the ability to blend colours from underlying layers, it’s more of a tool for the fine artist than for the photographer; but it still has its place in the naturalistic creation of backgrounds, and for more organic patching of artwork.

There’s a small modification to standard brush behaviour as well. Photoshop CS4 introduced the ability to resize a brush by dragging on the artwork, with a modifier key held. This behaviour has been refined so that you change the size of the brush by dragging left and right, and the hardness by dragging up and down.

Adobe Bridge has become the standard image browser and content management tool – but it means switching to a separate application. Now Photoshop sports its own Mini Bridge, which combines the most frequently used features of Bridge within a standard Photoshop panel. This allows you to browse images without leaving Photoshop, and to drag images directly into open documents. Previously, opening files from Bridge would always open as a separate document.

A range of additional minor tweaks makes using Photoshop easier in small ways. The Eyedropper tool now (optionally) produces a before/after preview as a ring around the selected area, showing the current and new foreground colours, together with a grey ring around those to isolate them from the rest of the artwork. The Zoom tool has a new “scrubby” mode that allows you to drag to zoom smoothly in and out of your artwork.

The Crop tool now has a Rule of Thirds overlay for better image composition. You can now define custom default states for Layer Styles, rather than relying on the factory-set presets; you can adjust the opacity of multiple selected layers at once; and a new Straighten command in the Ruler allows you to straighten images instantly.

Finally, a new online service called CS Review allows multiple users to interact on the same document simultaneously, with comments displayed in near real time. For those working in advertising or production workflows, this could be a real time-saver – or it could just give art directors more opportunities to tinker with a photographer’s work.

Conclusions
Photoshop CS5 is a solid, speedy upgrade with many new features that will delight seasoned users. Where camera manufacturers match each other’s equipment feature for feature, megapixel for megapixel, Photoshop has no direct competition: so all its enhancements come from user feedback, and from a genuine drive for innovation among its engineers.

While many photographers have moved the bulk of their workflow to either Adobe Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture, Photoshop remains the only real choice when you need to combine multiple images in a single file. But you can also use Photoshop in more creative ways with single images: thanks to the new Refine Edge and Content-Aware Fill tools, you’re able to select an object and move it anywhere within the scene, while effortlessly filling the gap left behind. Puppet Warp allows photographers to make subtle adjustments to the pose of people and animals in a truly realistic, organic way; and the new automation technologies in Lens Correction will greatly improve your workflow.

Naturally, Adobe is already making plans for Photoshop CS6, and we’ll just have to wait to see what’s in store in a couple of years. In the meantime, we can expect more and more of our workflow to be carried out online, whether through collaborative systems such as CS Review, or complete web-based applications. In the latter category, Adobe is developing a new system, currently codenamed Rome (because, presumably, all roads lead there). An online image editor, it also includes elements of Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver to create a new content creation tool. Built using Adobe Flex, it can operate either online or via a desktop application.

So is the future of image editing really online? Not as long as broadband speeds in the UK continue to lag so far behind the Far East, where 50MB and even 100Mb data rates are becoming the norm. Until a speedier infrastructure is put in place, we’ll continue to install copies of Photoshop natively on our computers – probably for many years to come.