The next version of Adobe’s Photoshop, CS6, is now available in BETA form as a free download. There are tons of new features, with a redesigned interface, and several features ported over from Adobe’s popular “Lightroom” application.
From Cult of Mac:
So what’s new? As our friend Jesus Diaz over at Gizmodo says, the biggest changes are the fixes to the basics. Crop is now undoable at any time, just like in Lightroom, and Photoshop also gets Lightroom’s shadow and highlight tools which pull details out of the dark and light parts of an image without making it look all HDR-y.
Also new: A Content-aware patch. This lets you clone out or repair a part of the image using another part of the image. The difference between this and regular cloning it that you don’t have to be very accurate, and Photoshop’s algorithms do all the tricky blending work for you.
Other photo features are iris and tilt-shift blur, wide angle correction, basic video editing and one called skin tone selection, this automatically separates people from the background by detecting their skin color.
This is all powered by a new engine under it all. The engine is called Mercury, it means you can apply effects in real time and see the results.
For photographers and design professionals, this could be a great update.
If you’d like to play around with the upcoming version of Photoshop, and do it for an excellent price – free – you can download the BETA from Adobe Labs here. The Mac version comes in at a little under a gig in size.