AV News 190 - Novembert 2012
The standalone version of standard Photoshop CS6 retails at £667.20 with
an upgrade from previous versions costing £190.80. You can also subscribe
to Adobe on a monthly basis, something many are not aware of.
Subscriptions are a flexible alternative for acquiring licensed access to
Adobe CS software. Subscriptions for the standard version are currently
around £17.58 per month. All prices quoted here are current at September
24th and include VAT.
Photoshop Extended version includes technology not available in the
standard version e.g. Mercury Graphics Engine for 3D which provides real
time editing effects. It costs £952.80 for the full version with an upgrade
costing £370.80. It should be noted that prices are for home versions. Prices
for Educational versions are lower but before purchasing an Educational
version you need to prove that you qualify to do so. Perhaps after seeing
these costs you'll be tempted to skip the rest of this article but read on,
Photoshop CS6 has some innovative functions that you may find very useful,
especially if you frequently do lots of complex editing and manipulating to
your images.
Upon opening CS6
the workspace looks
familiar, it is similar in
appearance to previous
versions, but does have
some additional tools
and
features,
the
default colour scheme
is also darker than
previous.
When CS5 was
introduced it included
the
new
feature
'Content Aware Fill'
whereby an area of unwanted detail could be removed and automatically
filled in to blend with the surrounding area.
Personally I found this function very useful, quick and simple to use. CS6
takes this idea a whole step further with the introduction of 'Content-Aware
Patch'. This is used to remove unwanted content from a photograph and then
replace it with a precise and seamless patch. This tool automatically creates
the patch for you, but allows you to choose which area of your image you'd
like it to sample from. Perhaps best described as being Content Aware Fill
with controllability. In similar but yet more advanced mode is another new
feature named 'Content-Aware Move'. This enables you to select an area of
detail, say perhaps a tree, then move that tree to another part of the picture
whereby the surrounding edge pixels automatically blend in with the new
area producing an invisible joint, also the area from where the tree was
moved magically fills and blends leaving no clue that the tree was ever there.
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