Adobe Photoshop gets new features for the desktop and iPad on its 30th birthday

[Humza]

In a nutshell: As is usually the case with birthdays, Photoshop also put on some weight after turning 30, albeit in the shape of several new feature updates and performance improvements across its desktop and iPad apps.

Photoshop, a byword for image editing and manipulation, crossed its 30th birthday recently. Although the software has faced stiff competition from several paid and free programs over the years, it continues to be one of the most feature-rich and complete products on the market today.

Adobe celebrated the milestone with a blog post announcing several new features for desktop and iPad users of Photoshop, starting with an enhanced Content-Aware Fill (CAF) workspace on PCs that allows for iteratively selecting and filling multiple areas of an image without having to leave the workspace window.

The next major feature for desktops is an improved Lens Blur filter that now uses the GPU to achieve a more realistic bokeh look for images. The updated algorithm is also able to generate blurrier edges on objects in front of the focal plane and can provide more colorful specular highlights in photos.

Users running macOS Catalina can now soothe their eyes with a dark mode for Photoshop that should blend nicely with the rest of the OS. There's also a few under the hood changes to make the UI more responsive to mouse and stylus movements with smoother panning, dragging, and zooming. For those on Windows, the latest Photoshop update removes the need for WinTab drivers, mostly used by artists for supporting styluses or digitizer tablets.

Photoshop's iPad app continues to catch up with the desktop version and receives the latter's Object Selection tool for quickly selecting and isolating items of interest in an image. There are also new type settings, including layer, character, and options properties that enable text tracking, leading, scaling and formatting (caps, strikethrough, subscript, etc.) with kerning to arrive in a future release.

Adobe's launch of Photoshop for iPad wasn't well-received initially due to a lack of features, but the company has put out multiple releases in a span of three months to close the gap with its desktop counterpart and is shipping new capabilities "as soon as the user experience has been adapted to the iPad and reimagined to take advantage of touch and mobility."

These latest updates should also help with improving file uploading and downloading speeds over the cloud, which Adobe says could end up being up to 90% faster, depending on file size and network performance.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/84090-adobe-photoshop-gets-new-features-desktop-ipad-30th.html

 

[Uncle Al]

No matter how "great" they claim to be, I view their subscription services no different than loot boxes in games. Now, if they offered a non-web based, stand alone version of the software that doesn't call for annual updates (at a cost) I would pay a lot more attention, but since there are other packages out there that fit this bill I'm turning a thumbs down to them.

 

[Dosahka]

No matter how "great" they claim to be, I view their subscription services no different than loot boxes in games. Now, if they offered a non-web based, stand alone version of the software that doesn't call for annual updates (at a cost) I would pay a lot more attention, but since there are other packages out there that fit this bill I'm turning a thumbs down to them.

I'm fortunate enough that my company provides Adobe CC for IT Support for testing new releases and I'm a long time Pro Create user, but PS still catching up and there are missing QoL features. It will be hard to change Pro Create user's mind to switch to PS on iPads

 

[Mister_K]

No matter how "great" they claim to be, I view their subscription services no different than loot boxes in games. Now, if they offered a non-web based, stand alone version of the software that doesn't call for annual updates (at a cost) I would pay a lot more attention, but since there are other packages out there that fit this bill I'm turning a thumbs down to them.

If you do this professionally the £50 a month it costs for all their apps is **** all. Then at the end of the year, you put it as expenses on your tax or have it freely provided by company.

£600 a year it costs is really nothing at all and about the same as back in the day.

Still I guess if there was competition in this market, it would be cheaper...

 

[antiproduct]

Still pretty happy I purchased the Adobe Master Suite 5.5 back in the day. I use it pretty infrequently and mostly from a hobby point of view, so paying monthly for it would be really prohibitive. Seriously, I hope people with my usage profile are just pirating it these days, the subscription model is pure greed.

 

[Raytrace3D]

If you do this professionally the £50 a month it costs for all their apps is **** all. Then at the end of the year, you put it as expenses on your tax or have it freely provided by company.

£600 a year it costs is really nothing at all and about the same as back in the day.

Still I guess if there was competition in this market, it would be cheaper...

Yup, that's what I do. It use to cost WAY more for a single Adobe product license and if you used more than Photoshop you had very high overhead and buy in, certainly much higher than 600 a year for everything. In my case, I use Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. Granted, it sucks to have to have an active internet connection and only 3 devices simultaneously (before you have to log a device out), but the cost is much more affordable and I get access to everything and an opportunity to try something I would have otherwise skipped.

 

[Raytrace3D]

Still pretty happy I purchased the Adobe Master Suite 5.5 back in the day. I use it pretty infrequently and mostly from a hobby point of view, so paying monthly for it would be really prohibitive. Seriously, I hope people with my usage profile are just pirating it these days, the subscription model is pure greed.

This I do agree with you there. If you don't use it often, the monthly subscription does not make sense at all. Adobe is effectively ignoring casual users in favor of professional creators, which in my opinion doesn't make sense in the long term (regarding conversion) when it comes to those people eventually transitioning to your product later; by then, they'd have found a cheaper alternative and likely would stick with that product rather than switch to Adobe.