AV News 190 - November 2012
Photoshop CS6 - An Overview
Keith Scott FRPS
Just as your bank balance recovers from purchasing Adobe Photoshop CS5
those nice people at Adobe launch their latest in professional photographic
editing tools designated CS6. Those of you who regularly read monthly
photographic magazines will no doubt be aware that the launch of this
software was actually announced way back on April 23rd. At launch this new
version of Photoshop was 13.00 effectively replacing 12.0.4 which was of
course the last version of CS5.
This new CS6 was updated in
August to version 13.0.1 thereby
eliminating a few minor bugs
usually inherent in new software.
Before dashing out to buy this
latest Photoshop there is one or
two essential points that you
should seriously consider. First
it's not cheap, Photoshop is
really a high grade professional
tool and like most good tools you
get what you pay for.
Secondly to ensure this
software functions properly you
must ensure that your system is
compatible especially your graphics card, which must be 'OpenGL 2.0'
capable. OpenGL is a cross language multi-platform application programming
interface for rendering 2D and 3D images. Some older computers especially
older laptops may not contain this current standard, It's worth visiting the
following independent website for additional information on a range of CS6
tested graphics cards.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Photoshop-CS6GPU-Acceleration-161 or to Adobe Systems own site for a list of compatible
graphics cards http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cs6gpu-faq.html#tested_cards
Let's consider the purchase options first: Just as in previous releases
Adobe Photoshop is available in two different types i.e. Standard Photoshop
and Photoshop Extended, the latter having 3D Editing functions that are not
available in standard Photoshop, along with video editing functions including
sound track. For most Audio-Visual workers 3D is not an essential
requirement although it could be useful perhaps with text for producing
interesting title graphics. The Extended version is also available as part of a
comprehensive professional package named 'Creative Suite 6 Master
Collection', although the cost of this package at £2,667.60 will