Creatives around the world can rejoice this week, as one of their most relied upon tools has a birthday. Sadly, you’ll need to Photoshop your own cake.
It can be hard to recall the days before tools in the digital era changed our lives, but there was a time before, back in the “good ol’ days”.
Remember life before smartphones, when browsing the internet on your phone consisted of only a few lines of text and one of the weakest experiences WAP could possibly provide? And how about life before your phone had a camera as one of its main features, where if you wanted an impromptu photo, you better believe you needed to carry a camera on your person at all times.
Life before digital tools we rely on was very different, and the same is true with Photoshop, which back before its inception and gradual evolution saw creatives working in a very manual way.
My, my, how time has changed.
Adobe’s image editing and creation tool Photoshop turned 30 this week, and the tool has come a long way. While its first use was for special effects on the James Cameron film The Abyss, you can now expect Photoshop to be used for much, much more, from photo editing to compositing, image creation, and even a bit of 3D.
This week and as part of its 30th birthday, Adobe has improved a few things, boosting performance on both desktop and its iPad version.
On your computer, Adobe has added support for dark mode on macOS, with the interface looking like it blends in with the rest of a MacBook or Mac desktop if dark mode is switched on the operating system level.
Beyond this, Adobe has improved the way its Content-Aware Fill technology works, allowing editors to work inside a specific environment to continue editing an image and make tweaks to remove elements, with software smarts able to fill in the spots previously occupied with other elements.
There are also improvements to blurring in filters, with Adobe running the processing for Lens Blur on your graphics chip, delivering improved results based on how light plays with objects in the real world.
Adobe also says performance improvements have been made, making for a smoother Photoshop experience on the desktop, but it’s not the only place Adobe’s improvements can be found.
The Photoshop app for the iPad also sees a change or two, with support now for Object Selection aided by artificial intelligence. It means that if you use Photoshop on the iPad, you’ll be able to select elements of a photo for editing or removal of the layer simply by telling iPad Photoshop to look for objects, finding objects using artificial intelligence.
Alongside this feature, Adobe is also rolling out more typographic controls, so you can set words, phrases, and fonts up with a little more control on Photoshop to go.
And much like its desktop iteration, Adobe says performance improvements are rolling out, particularly with regards to file sizes, allowing you to upload and download large Photoshop documents (PSDs) more efficiently.
