With Photoshop celebrating its 30th anniversary, Adobe has announced a bunch of improvements to the veteran app both on desktop and in the iPad-version, not least the support for dark mode on the Mac (yes, even darker than it is already).
The much-loved Content-Aware Fill has been improved – you can now make multiple selections and apply multiple fills directly and deal with layers better within the tool palette itself. This will help when repeatedly performing the same fills. You can also break the image into areas for Content-Aware Fill now which should also help the context-awareness be more accurate.
The Lens Blur filter has also been improved by offloading all the hard work to your graphics card – the effect is more realistic and foreground objects also have better edge effects.
The iPad version also has the relatively-new-to-desktop object selection tool which can auto-select key elements of your image without you having to do anything.
So, say you’ve got a bunch of items on a background, the tool can select all of those at the same time. Or you can roughly lasso an object (like a person) and the AI in the app can identify the precise edges of the object. We saw this previewed in person at the Adobe Max event last November and it really is a very powerful tool.
Photoshop has had a busy 30 years and Adobe reminded users of the use of the first use of Photoshop – even before Photoshop 1.0 was released – to create visual effects for James Cameron’s movie, The Abyss.