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The best new feature in Photoshop CS5

To me this is by far the best new feature in Photoshop CS5. It seems like just the other day I downloaded the trial for CS4 and after a month in South Africa I get home to discover that there is yet another new release. Us photographers and retouchers are creatures of habit and approach change with an almighty spirit of resistance. We have our way of working and we like to stick to it.

I listen to a lot of photography Podcasts and whilst editing a wedding we shot near Cape Town, switched on to listen to:
“Camera Dojo talkes to Photoshop’s Product Manager”

There are some improvements that sounded interesting to me like Mini Bridge, the improved Sharpen Tool and the Content-Aware Fill. Watch a video on You Tube by the same product manager who was interviewed by Camera Dojo:
Adobe Photoshop CS5: Content-Aware Fill Sneak Peek

It is pretty impressive! Still no replacement for the human eye, but a very good start when removing objects from a landscape or it could be useful when extending images for printing in commercial retouching or fashion jobs (retouchers out there, feel my pain!).

Now to the the part where I am most impressed… drum-roll please…
Adobe Photoshop CS5 can now utilise up to around 11 Gigs of RAM! Finally, thank-you Adobe! This is the one I have been waiting for. Each new release has only been able to use up to around 4 Gigs of RAM. I have 16 Gigs of RAM in my machine which wasn’t much help with the past versions of Photoshop. Now, as you can see in the screengrab I have set it to utilise a much larger amount of RAM and let me tell you it is flying through my Actions, flying through resizing images and generally much slicker to use.

Photoshop CS5 Reveiw - Best new Feature