If you still haven’t upgraded to Photoshop CS6, and are wondering whether you should consider, let me give you some of the amazing new features that I find useful, to help you make a decision.
Auto-Save
Probably, one of the best things they’ve done in Photoshop, is something that you won’t see. How many times have you been working on a document only to have Photoshop crash and you lose all your work?!
CS6 now has a built in auto-save function. Every 10 minutes to an hour, depending upon how you set it, Photoshop will automatically save your work to a recovery file. If the worst happens, and you forget to save, when Photoshop opens up again, it will ask you if you wish to open the auto-saved recovered file.
You can find the settings in the Preferences > File Handling.
Auto Save Options
Background Save
Another background feature, for those of you working on really huge files, is that when you do a save, the document will be saved in the background and you can continue working whilst Photoshop does the saving. No more hanging around watching the blue bar amble its way across to the right!
New Layers Features
New ways of finding your layers. At the top of the Layers Palette are some new icons and a drop-down menu. These enable you to show appropriate layers. For example you have a document with 30 layers, 4 of which are text and 3 are adjustment layers. You want to see just the text layers so just click the little ‘T’ icon at the top and it hides all the other layers.
Layers Palette – New Options at Top
The Dark and Moody Interface
The most obvious new feature in PS CS6 is the dark and moody interface! I really like this, however, I know that a lot of people prefer the lighter version from CS5.
This can be changed quite easily by going into the Preferences > Interface and choosing the shade of grey that suits you.
Interface Options – Shades of Grey
Crop Tool
You’ll notice that the new Crop Tool works slightly differently to the older versions. In fact, there are two different versions of the Crop Tool in CS6.
If you have bought PS CS6 or downloaded it in the usual way, ie paying the full amount or the upgrade amount, then the Crop Tool input box on the options bar, will give you two input boxes for your size. What will have disappeared is the resolution input box. If you have bought PS CS6 using Adobe’s cloud option, then you will find all three input boxes are there.
Crop Tool Input Boxes
If you wish to change the resolution and now don’t have the option, you can input this by clicking the drop-down box to the left of the input boxes and choosing Size and Resolution.
Size & Resolution for Crop Tool
The way the Crop Tool now works, is that when you crop the image, the crop stays still and the image moves around behind the crop – as opposed to the earlier version where the image stayed still and the crop area moved. This does take some getting used to and if you don’t like it you can change it back to the original way via the Options Bar. Where the drop-down box which by default says Rule of Thirds, there is a ‘cog’ icon. Click this and you can choose Use Classic Mode.
Other Cloud Only Features
Certain filters, for example the new blur filters – Field, Iris and Tilt-Shift – can only be used on a Smart Object if you have bought PS via the Cloud.