Adobe Releases Major Photoshop CC Update Today and Announces More Digital Imaging Product Features Coming Soon

From the ethereal work of Flora Borsi to the bold and bright art of Fredy Santiago, Photoshop is used to create much of the creative and outlandish visuals that surround us every day. Virtually every customer I meet can tell me about their “Photoshop moment.” That moment in time when they discovered they could use their creative talents, paired with the power and freedom of Photoshop, not only to bring their vision to life, but in many cases to also make a living.

It’s these Photoshop moment stories that inspire me most. Recently one of my colleagues visited an orphanage in Vietnam where they teach the children how to use Photoshop. When the children age out of the orphanage, they can use the product and the skills they learned to earn a living, making almost 600% more per week than an unskilled worker, to help lift themselves out of a future life of poverty.

It is a great privilege to work on a product that has such a positive impact on so many people’s lives and livelihoods, which is why I am thrilled today to announce a new release of Photoshop.

This release has something for everyone, from powerful new photo editing capabilities, to performance improvements, to fresh Adobe magic that enables new workflows, to major enhancements to popular features…and more.

To install the update, launch Photoshop and select Help > Updates. For notes on important update and installation considerations, please see Jeff Tranberry’s 2015.5 FAQ here.

Read on to see what you’re getting today and in the next few weeks:

Jump to photo editing features

Jump to design-oriented features

Released Today in Photoshop CC

Adobe Stock

http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/files/2016/06/AdobeStock_OpenIn.jpg

Stock imagery is an important component of many creative workflows. Today we release two new features that make incorporating stock images into your work more efficient:

• Open-In Photoshop from Adobe Stock: While previewing images on the Adobe Stock website, you can open them directly inside Photoshop (or InDesign or Illustrator).
• In-Photoshop Purchase: You can now license a stock image directly from the layers panel or on-canvas via a contextual menu. This is in addition to the currently available functionality of licensing the image via the Libraries panel.

We will have more great Adobe Stock features rolling out, one of which I’ll sneak out to you now. Soon it will be easier than ever to contribute your own images, illustrations, vectors and video footage to Adobe Stock and be part of the world’s leading creative marketplace and start to earn royalties. You will be able to upload your work to Adobe Stock directly from within Lightroom, Bridge, Photoshop Mix and Fix as well as the web. Our intelligent auto-tagging will make the job even easier.

Performance Improvements

Not much makes our customers happier than when we boost Photoshop’s performance so you can get stuff done faster. So over the next few releases our engineers are heavily focusing on increasing the speed of operations across the application. This will include improving start up time, removing unnecessary dialog boxes, warnings and clicks, as well as how quickly features return results.

Download today’s upgrade and you will notice a significantly faster installation – the font menu is up to 4x faster and Content-Aware Fill is up to 3x faster and also delivers better results. You will also experience a faster launch time and improved opening of documents.

Note that this is just the beginning of a big, multi-release focus on performance, and we plan to deliver even more improvements in future updates.

Photography focused features

Selection and Masking Space

As a new Photoshop product manager back in 2005, one of the first features I worked on was the Quick Selection Tool. Now my baby is all grown up. Today we introduce Selection and Masking Space, a dedicated workspace that brings many of the best Photoshop selection tools together into one efficient work space, and updates them with new and improved algorithms to make creating selections and masks easier, more exact, and more efficient. In addition to better results, we designed the new work space to minimize clicks, mouse movements and user interface clutter. You’ll find a couple of new features inside the work space:

• Visualization controls: A Transparency slider and “Onion Skin” view mode more accurately predict results with new visualization and controls that make it easier to see the edges and other qualities of the selections you are creating in real time while you are making them.
• Refine Edge Brush: Get more precise results with the new Refine Edge Brush that helps to more accurately separate foreground and background for complex selections.
• A simple brush to more precisely control exactly which areas of an image are selected or masked. This tool can be used for manual control.

Content-Aware Crop

A couple of weeks ago, we gave you a sneak peek at the new Content-Aware Crop capabilities. In case you missed it, you can now better preserve the look of your image when you crop using the magic of Content-Aware Fill. Photoshop will intelligently fill in the gaps when you rotate or expand a canvas beyond the original image size using the Crop tool.

Here are some popular uses for it:

• Move the horizon by adding more sky or ground
• Change the aspect ratio by adding content around the edges of your image
• Fill in the corners when you rotate an image so you don’t give up any of your pixels
• …and probably more we haven’t even imagined ourselves

Face-Aware Liquify

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/face-aware-liquify.html?set=photoshop--whats-new--2016-06

Retouchers and anyone taking photos of people will really enjoy this new enhancement to the Liquify tool. First introduced last year in our mobile application Photoshop Fix, we have improved that algorithm even more and brought it to Photoshop CC. Now within the Liquify tool, you can use the new Face-Aware technology to automatically identify and adjust facial features like jaw, nose, lips and eyes to retouch them or add artistic effects.****

Design focused features

Match Font

Today we are introducing the new Match Font feature. Thanks to the magic of intelligent imaging analysis, using just a picture with some text (representing a Latin based language), Photoshop will use machine learning to detect which font it is, and match it to licensed fonts on your computer or on Typekit.

To use the feature, you open an image that includes text, for example a street sign, then make a selection of the image area that contains the text, and when Photoshop recognizes the font, it presents you with a list of closest matches for which you have licensing rights. Try it out. It feels pretty magical to me.

To all of you type geeks out there, and I know there are a lot of you…you might have noticed that over the last two years we have made a significant investment in many aspects of type usage in Photoshop. Because it is so big, I will summarize it all here:

• Search and Organize Fonts Quickly
  • View fonts by family (new this release): A more hierarchical font menu shows font families and lets you toggle to see fonts within that family, rather than seeing all fonts in a giant list.
  • Performance improvements in font menu (new this release): Font menu is faster because of improvements to showing samples for each font.
  • Favorites: Star fonts that you use frequently and then filter to only show those fonts.
  • Recently used: Photoshop will display your most recently used fonts at the top of the font list.
  • Search for fonts: Start to type the name of the font to find a font, rather than browsing with a scrollbar.
• Go deeper into a given font
  • Glyph Panel: Use the Glyphs panel to insert punctuation, superscript and subscript characters, currency symbols, numbers, specialized characters, as well as glyphs from other languages into text.
  • On-canvas Glyph (new this release): On-canvas menu allows you to view and select alternate glyphs for the currently selected character.
• Expand beyond your commonly used fonts
  • Typekit: Thousands of free fonts for Creative Cloud members to use; integrated into Photoshop’s font menu, missing font check workflow, similarity search and Match Font feature.
  • Match Font (new this release): Start with a raster image of a Latin font and Photoshop will tell you which fonts on your local machine or in your Typekit library are close matches.
  • Filter by Classification: Narrow the fonts in your font list by classification, like serif or sans serif.
  • Filter by visual similarity: Narrow the fonts in your font list based on similarity to your selected font.

To pull it all together for you, we have created this page of tutorials dedicated to using type in Photoshop. Here we have help videos for beginners through experts: http://adobe.ly/28Jlx8w

Creative Cloud Libraries

We introduced Creative Cloud Libraries in 2014 as a powerful way to store and share design elements in an easily accessible panel. With Libraries, assets can be quickly applied across multiple documents as well as shared across many other Creative Cloud applications and even shared with your friends and colleagues. If you haven’t tried Creative Cloud Libraries yet, it’s time to check it out.

Today we add:

• Read-only Library collaboration: Share a Library as read-only so your teammates can use the assets, but can’t change, rename or delete them.
• Adobe Stock license badge: Easily identify if a Stock asset in your library is licensed.
• Larger Libraries panel: Photoshop automatically detects if you have a large monitor and offers a bigger Libraries panel for easier asset browsing.
• New asset type support: Colors can be saved into panels. In addition, looks and patterns easily captured through Adobe Capture CC (a free mobile app) can be saved to libraries for easy use in Photoshop. Plus, Styles saved in Creative Cloud Libraries can be applied by drag-and-drop directly from the Library to the document.
• Filtered Stock and Library search results: Helps you find the content you want faster.

Artboards

New enhancements to Artboards in Photoshop in this release include:

• Duplicate a layer or layer group and place the content into selected artboards
• Easily change an artboard background
• View transparency within an artboard

Export As

New Export As enhancements include the ability to embed color profiles.****

More Great Updates from other Creative Cloud Apps

Share Patterns from the Capture CC mobile app directly with Photoshop

http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/files/2016/06/EaglePattern.jpeg

Have you tried the Capture CC mobile app yet? It’s a free mobile app available from the iTunes app store or Google Play, and it’s really cool. With it, you can turn any image into a color theme, pattern, unique brush, look or vector graphic that you can use in your creative projects on desktop and mobile devices.

Now Creative Cloud Libraries supports patterns inside Photoshop. Capture some patterns with this application, jazz them up with the filters and other effects we include in the app, and then send them to Photoshop via Creative Cloud Libraries to use in your work.

If you’d like to get more information on what’s new in this release of Photoshop, click here. And to learn more about other great new Creative Cloud features now available, click here.

Customers and friends, Photoshop wouldn’t exist without the amazing work you create. Thank you for making the world a more beautiful place. We can’t wait to see what you create with these new features and enhancements.

Pam Clark

Director of Product Management, Photoshop