| PhotoshopR CS6 has some new built-in intelligence and on-canvas tool enhancements that will help photographers. From fixing wide angle lens problems in your photos to new auto corrections tools, your workflow will be helped considerably. Adaptive Wide Angle Distorted objects in pictures taken with a wide angle lens have been a problem for many years. Now with Photoshop's Lens Correction Profile database, Photoshop can do the work for you when correcting common problems.
Camera Raw 7 Improved With Adobe's new Tone-Mapping Algorithm, you have better control over highlights and shadows adjustments. This better contrast management makes it easier to maintain the details in both areas as you make your adjustments. The on-canvas Adjustment Brush has new slider controls for Temperature, Tint, Highlights, Shadows, Noise Reduction and Moire Reduction. A few Tonal controls have been replaced with new sliders. The Fill-Light and Recovery sliders have been replaced by the new Highlights and Shadows sliders. The Exposure slider now controls the overall brightness. New Enhance Brightness and Contrast Option When working with Curves, Levels and Brightness and Contrast in problem photos, you have a new option added to the Algorithms menu. This new Enhance Brightness and Contrast algorithm is based on the collection of detailed results from numerous manually edited images. New Face-Detection Option Working with skin tones in photos has been made easier with the new Face-Detection option. You can now better select or isolate skin-tone areas to keep them untouched when working on the rest of the photo. Of course, this new option can be used to isolate these same areas for adjusting skin tones themselves, leaving the rest of the photo unchanged. To use this new option, choose Select - Color Range to open the Color Range dialog box. In the Select menu, choose Skin Tones and check the box next to Detect Faces. New Photoshop Preferences For those of you who like the new darker interface that has been popping up in most software, you will be glad to see that Photoshop CS6 has joined the others with a new darker workspace. For those of us who prefer the old lighter workspace, it is still available. In fact, we now have the choice of four color themes. From the Interface section of the Photoshop Preferences dialog box, you can set your choice of color theme. Another feature that doesn't work well with the way I work but others will probably like is the new Background Save and Auto Recovery options. With the new Mercery Graphics Engine, Photoshop can save your work in the background as you continue to make changes to the document. You can also tell Photoshop how often to save Recovery Information. The default is 10 minutes. You will find these new options in the File Handling section of the Preferences dialog box. *Adobe provided a copy of this software to me for review purposes. Join us in the Flash forum. | Join us in the Digital Art and Design forum. | |

