So Adobe has recently released Photoshop CS6. I’ve only recently installed CS5 on my home computer so haven’t really had a chance to get used to that yet but I should be getting CS6 on my work computer towards the end of the month. There has been a lot of buzz in the graphic design world about the updates but as far as I can see so far, few of the changes will be relevant to scientific imaging (being mostly to do with the content-aware tool and other image manipulations that are not relevant to scientific images). There are a few changes I’m looking forward to testing out though:
The new user interface.
Apparently Adobe has modified the user interface to make it easier to keep track of multiple documents and panels. I haven’t quite got used to the CS4/5 interface yet but am looking forward to seeing what CS6 can do as I often have multiple documents open at the same time.
The ability to stroke a path with a dotted line
This is an exciting new feature for me as I very often use a dotted line over an image to highlight a particular region of interest. It really bugged me during my PhD that I couldn’t work out how to do a proper dashed line (as opposed to dots) and I finally figured it out a few weeks after submitting my thesis! Looks like this new feature will make it much easier though. For those who aren’t upgrading to CS6 I’ll do a tutorial about how to do a dashed line in earlier versions soon.
Background saving
This sounds interesting. When making montages with lots of layers it is important to save regularly but large psd files can take a long time to save and it can be frustrating to have to wait. Now we should be able to continue editing other images while saving large files. Yay!
Creative Cloud
I don’t think I’ll be subscribing to the Creative Cloud as with educational pricing it’s going to be better to just buy the software outright, but if I were looking to purchase the software for home use and having to pay full price then I think I would consider the subscription type service.
Of course, I’m also looking forward to playing with the image manipulation tools as I love to use Photoshop for design and photo manipulation as well as scientific imaging. And you never know when a tool designed for creative purposes may come in useful for technical imaging.