Adobe Photoshop CC

Creative Cloud changes everything. Well, maybe not everything: Adobe Photoshop CC looks nearly identical to its CS6 predecessor, but it packs several powerful new features, including a revolutionary photo motion blur corrector, more effective image upscaling (think getting those low-def images looking good on a Retina display), new photo geometry corrections, and multiple shape and path selections.

Since it's part of the cloud subscription, as long as you pay $19.99 a month for Photoshop alone or $49.99 for the full creative suite ($29.99 for students, teachers, and upgraders from CS3 and later), you'll always have access to any new features that come along. That sounds more palatable to me than the old $699 to $999 up front, though I realize that some longtime users have expressed displeasure that they have to continue paying to use software. With the subscription, it would take you at least 3 years to spend the previous up-front money, and by then, you'd probably want to upgrade anyway.

Another way that Creative Cloud affects new Photoshop users is that they'll now get all the Photoshop tools, including features that used to be available only in the Photoshop Extended edition, such as 3D modeling and image analysis. Extended costs $999, so this is quite a perk, not to mention that it simplifies your product choice.

Install
You should only consider installing Photoshop on a fairly powerful PC or Mac. You also need to sign in with your Adobe ID before the installer will let you start. I installed on a Windows 8 PC (Photoshop CC runs on Windows 7 with Service Pack 1, but not on earlier Windows OS versions) with a 3.4GHz quad-core processor and 4GB RAM. It took about 20 minutes, and, right off the bat, I got a message saying that 3D editing wouldn't be available because of my video card or its driver. Mac users will need OS X 10.7 or 10.8.?

Interface
The Photoshop UI remains largely unchanged from that of Photoshop CS6, which was a big advance over CS5. All your left-side tools and right-side panels are still available, in a choice of workspaces suited to standard image editing, 3D, motion, painting, photography, and typography. It's incredibly customizable, and you can save presets for all your customizations. The new cloud connectivity also means that you can log into a copy of Photoshop at a different location and have all your interface customizations show up.

Another helpful aspect of the interface is that, for most updated features, you can check a "Use legacy" box to get the old tool you're used to. Plenty of other little conveniences (which Adobe likes to call JDIs, for "just do it") have been added to the world's premiere photo editing software. For example, you can now nudge a path with the spacebar. Actions can now be conditional, using if/then expressions.

Behance
Behance is a social network for creative professionals, offering online portfolios and connections. It will be built into all the Creative Cloud applications, which will let users post projects for feedback from colleagues and clients. Users can post their files directly from Photoshop CC via a one-click share button at the lower left. From Behance they can share and discuss the work and even connect with potential and existing clients and freelancers.

Behance's ProSites are the customizable online portfolios, which Creative Cloud subscribers can use with their own URLs. I found Behance's presentation elegant, clean, and incorporating all the essential social features du jour. I especially like that it offers statistics of your page activity. You can also export photos in Zoomify format?a cool viewer that lets viewers zoom deep into large images?but I'd like to see more sharing options, like a built-in email and Flickr sharing. Of course, you can do all this from Photoshop's ancillary Bridge image organizer app.

New Tools for Photography
Camera Shake Reduction. The hottest, most anticipated new feature of Photoshop CC is the modestly named Camera Shake Reduction. This was first shown by Adobe two years ago at its Max conference to raves. The tool analyzes the photo to find the path of shake motion, and then aligns the shifted pixels. Sounds simple, but it's harder to get right than it may seem. This is because the path won't be the same everywhere in the photo unless you shook it exactly along a single plane?highly unlikely. You can use the tool's best guess, or select a region (or regions) where you want the blur trace to be estimated.

You can also adjust Blur Trace Bounds, Smoothing, and Artifact Suppression?the last two let me create a less "sharpened" looking result. I'd love to see a simple "effect strength" adjustment like that you get with Smart Sharpen (which, by the way, with this release gets a new Reduce Noise slider). Shake Reduction is not a panacea, but it's definitely a finer effect than even the Smart Sharpen tool. If the subject is simply out of focus, it won't help you; a simply blurry subject won't be fixed.

New Camera Raw Features. Photoshop CC benefits from several new Camera Raw capabilities, some of which we've already seen in the Lightroom 5 beta. The latter include a new geometry correction tool, Upright. This lets you fix parallel vertical and horizontal lines. Its Auto setting attempts to fix perspective, but you can choose only to align verticals or only horizontals, or mess with the perspective to taste with transforming sliders for pincushion/barrel distortion, vertical, horizontal, and aspect ratio.

Maybe the most useful new Camera Raw feature is that you can use it as a filter, applying all its manifold photo adjustments?color temperature, exposure, geometry, all of it?to any image layer. Before, you could only work with this powerful tool when you were actually importing a photo. Now, you can even apply camera raw adjustments to video, and use a non-circular healing brush. As in Lightroom 5, you also get a radial filter, that lets you apply the adjustments to an oval shape, such as a person's head?very useful for highlighting that bit of anatomy.

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