Photoshop turns years old today, and in honor of this most feared of millennial milestones, Adobe has released a major update for Photoshop on both the desktop and the iPad, improving some of the most-used and important features on both platforms: Content Aware Fill and Object Selection.
As usual, the updates were detailed in a post published moments ago on the Adobe blog by Photoshop’s Product Manager Pam Clark, and there’s quite a bit to unpack.
Photoshop on Desktop
OG Photoshop — the kind you use on your computer — is getting two major feature improvements, a minor update to the UI, and a performance boost today.
The Content Aware Fill is getting
yet another upgrade, the Lens Blur filter is getting a quality and performance boost, “Dark Mode” is now supported on Mac, and you should notice some “key performance improvements” when panning and zooming around a canvas.
Content Aware Fill Improvements
The biggest feature improvement to Photoshop on desktop comes to the Content Aware Fill tool. Specifically the workspace, where you can now “Apply” multiple fills and iterate as many times as you want before you click OK and accept your results.
This improvement comes straight from customer-feedback, according to Adobe.
“One of your top requests was to stay in the workspace to refine fills that need multiple CAF iterations — imagine removing something from behind many tree branches, or other tricky scenes with visual diversity,” explains Clark “To do that , we now enable you to break the fill region into sub-parts to give you more iterative control to achieve a more realistic fill. ”
You can still use the standard automatic Content Aware Fill feature under Edit> Fill, but the workspace is getting to be much, much more usable thanks to updates like this.
Lens Blur Improvements
Today’s update allegedly improved the Lens Blur filter in a big way by moving this process over to the GPU from the CPU. This should improve both the output quality and performance of the tool moving forward, thanks in part to the “more colorful bokeh via the specular highlights.”
The highlights in particular are very clear in the before and after below:
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