These can include gradient and brush settings, for example. At first you might have to hunt around a little to find the panel you need, but it’s easy to customise the layout and Photoshop also offers a variety of ‘workspaces’ for different kinds of work, which can hide the tools you don’t use and make those you do need more accessible.Īlong the top of the window is a row of tool options which change according to the tool you’ve currently selected. Tools are displayed in a narrow vertical toolbar on the left side of the screen – tools with more than one option display them on fly-out menus – and the program’s numerous palettes are arranged on the right side of the screen and can be stacked, combined with tabs, shrunk and expanded at will. Lightroom CC vs Lightroom Classic: 13 things you need to knowįor all its power, the Photoshop CC 2018 interface is actually a refreshingly straightforward place to work.
Photoshop’s mastery of digital illusion is unquestioned – if you can imagine it, you can create it.
Nevertheless, for photographers there’s no other tool, with the exception of Serif Affinity Photo, which offers the same detailed, technical, professional level of control over photographic image enhancement and manipulation. Photoshop is a multi-purpose tool with many uses not connected to photography, which goes some way to explaining why it can appear so complex and technical. Photographers can use it to retouch portraits, enhance landscapes, create special effects, merge frames into panoramas and build composite images from separate photos.Īrtists and illustrators, meanwhile, use photoshop for designing posters, developing application interfaces and creating technical diagrams and digitally painting original artwork.
Photoshop is used for much more than that, of course. Photoshop is the world’s most famous image-editing program and so widely used that it’s entered the English language as a verb – to ‘Photoshop’ something is to apply a digital manipulation that distorts, enhances or even manufactures versions of reality. In addition, Dropbox users can now preview the first artboard in their XD files right in their folders without downloading the files first.Adobe has updated its flagship photo-editing tool with a 2018 version, so what’s new? Find out in our Photoshop CC 2018 review.
For now, this feature is only available on the Mac (because these are Mac tools), but the company will likely offer similar integrations on Windows in the future. XD users get support for multiple third-party tools, including Zeplin, Avocode, Sympli, ProtoPie and Kite Compositor, which allow you to start your design in those tools and then bring them to XD.
The other Creative Cloud tool that’s getting an update today is Adobe XD, the company’s tool for designing and prototyping websites and mobile apps. If you are using the Microsoft Dial, you’ll now also be able to change brush settings with your favorite desktop hockey puck. Other new features in this update include the aforementioned support for high density monitors on Windows 10, which means Photoshop will now automatically adjust itself based on your Windows scaling settings, as well as some other improvements to the select and masking tools. You simply click “Select > Subject” and Photoshop will do the rest.
In return, though, you don’t get a lot of manual control over the selection process as the machine learning-powered tools will decide which objects are in the image and which they should select. The promise here is that even though Select Subject isn’t always going to be the perfect solution, the tool will give you a quick starting selection that’s typically far better than what you would get with existing tools. Selecting objects in an image typically takes a bit of work and while the selection tools in Photoshop have improved over the years, it still takes a good bit of manual work to ensure that you only select the parts you want. But the highlight of the release is the new Select Subject tool that uses Adobe’s Sensei AI platform to make selecting objects as simple as a click. Adobe is launching an update to Photoshop CC today that includes a number of new features, including better support for high density monitors and the Microsoft dial for Windows users.