"There’s an updated paintkit with a larger selection of brushes and improved edge detection to make it easier to mask areas."
Rosie Khdir, 6th October 2010
Adobe Photoshop is shrugging its way out of those tumultuous teenage years by turning 20 this year. And what a birthday it’s proving to be.
Adobe Photoshop CS5 was released on 12 April and (for me especially) many the new features on offer are by far the most exciting to date.
What we like most
Top of the pile is Content Aware Fill. This will allow you to selectively edit areas of an image, and then delete and cover it seamlessly with the image around it.
This was previously possible, but it took a great deal of both skill and time. Adobe Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill appears to make it almost effortless, check out the official Adobe video on YouTube, it’s racked up well over 2 million hits.
Adobe Photoshop has an updated paintkit with a larger selection of brushes and improved edge detection to make it easier to mask areas.
PatchMatch is a sampling tool, similar to content aware fill, allowing you to patch an image based on the surrounding content.
What we like least
It’s not really a complaint, but this Adobe Photoshop is very much a top end business piece for graphic designers and professional photographers.
The price, therefore, may be understandable, but you will easily find cheaper photo editing software out there at a lesser price. You will also be purchasing a lesser system, but for most people that’ll do just fine.
Adobe Photoshop CS5
With Adobe Photoshop CS5 you are purchasing serious graphics power. The average person buying this for personal use will be wasting their money unless they are well trained in the arts of computer graphic design and intend to do some serious work with it.
Adobe Photoshop is a demanding software that requires high grade hardware to run effectively but when it does you get to play with the best image editing software that money's ever bought.
Learn more GOFeatures
NEW: Content-Aware fill removes unwanted images elements and fills the space left behind
Add On
Available as an upgrade
Download or CD
CD
Compatible with
Windows XP - 7 & Macs
System Requirements
- Windows – Intel Pentium 4 AMD Athlon 64 processor
- Microsoft XP – Windows 7
- 1 Gb RAM
- 9.3 Gb of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on removable flash-based storage devices)
- 1280 x 800 display with qualified hardware accelerated OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit colour, and 256 Mb of VRAM
- Some GPU –accelerated features require graphics support for sharer Model 3.0 AND Open GL 2.0
- DirextX 9 capable graphics card
- DVD-ROM
- Java Runtime Environment 1.5 (32-bit) or 1.6
- QuickTime 7.6.2 software
- Adobe Flash Player 10
- Broadband internet for online services
- Mac OS requirements
- Multicore Intel processor
- Mac OS X v10.5.7 or v10.6
- 10.3 Gb of available hard-disk space for installation (cannot install on a volume that uses uses case sensitive file system or on removable flash-based storage devices
- Some of the Windows requirements are also applicable for Mac systems
Adobe Photoshop is one of the few software programmes that can genuinely lay claim to iconic status. John Hillman looks back on 20 years of image editing history.
Photoshop’s birthday
Every now and then a product comes along that kills the competition so completely that its name becomes the verb for the task it that it performs.
With the ascendancy of Adobe’s Photoshop, the process of image manipulation, from production suites of Condé Nast to the average high street printers, became known as ‘photo-shopping’, or simply ‘shopping’. Just as we all ‘google’ something these days instead of searching for it, whilst maybe drinking a ‘coke’ that may well just be a cola, and even ‘hoovering’ our flat with a Dyson or a Henry.
It’s rare indeed for a product to achieve such an all out victory. So it’s worth saying congratulations to Photoshop on its 20th birthday and having a look at its enormous influence over the last two decades.
Leading publishing software
As the principal software behind the world’s magazine industry, Photoshop has been no stranger to controversy. It has been accused of creating an unrealistic idea of human perfection as magazines stretch out the world’s already super-thin supermodels. It was once used to airbrush Robbie Williams out of a Take That single cover, after he was sacked for getting publicly wasted with Liam Gallagher during the heady days of Glastonbury 1995.
It has also provided some great laughs. In fact there’s a whole website dedicated to Photoshop disasters where you can see the bizarre mutilated after effects of images that have been subjected to poor ‘Shopping’ practice. It’s a digital freak show of phantom limbs, missing navels and bizarrely contorted torsos. Well worth a look.
The world’s Adobe community
But away from the glitches and the glitz there’s a whole community of people who have grasped the almost endless creative possibilities of Adobe Photoshop. Whether it’s a simple polish of a family photo or the artistic manipulation of a carefully crafted HDR image, has there really been anything as influential in photography since the invention of the digital camera?
Photoshop continues to assert itself wherever there are images being made. The latest example of this comes with the free Photoshop iPhone app that lets you quickly touch up your mobile snaps before uploading them to your social networking sites. It has already become the second most popular app on the iPhone with over six million downloads.
In the history of art it is said that the challenge posed to artists by the invention of the camera led to the rise of contemporary modern art itself. Photoshop may never quite prove to be as monumental a cultural development as that, but working in tandem with the Internet and Web 2.0 it has democratised publishing and placed it firmly in the hands of the masses. It’s an intrinsic part of a new world that would have been unimaginable to our great grandparents.
Image credit: Joey Parsons
Add a review of the Adobe Photoshop CS5
We are currently building a list of exciting vouchers for you to choose from. While we do this, why not take a look at our expert review for the Adobe Photoshop CS5 review
