Adobe Debuts Photoshop CC, With RAW Editing As A Filter And Advanced Camera Shake Reduction
Adobe is having its annual MAX conference this week, and today it lifted the lid on a number of new products, including Photoshop CC, the new, Creative Cloud-era version of its incredibly popular photo editing application. Photoshop CC is in many ways an evolution of the Photoshop brand, adding some powerful new features while mostly keeping things similar to CS6, but it’s a significant departure in terms of the way Photoshop gets updated, released and sold.
First, the new features, since two in particular are especially impressive: The new camera shake reduction engine looks like an actual miracle worker, and the updated RAW editing engine in CC gets the best of Adobe’s recent Lightroom update, plus the ability to do continuous, non-destructive RAW edits, something which hasn’t been available in the past. That’s thanks to the introduction of RAW editing as a filter, which you can use even with non RAW images to get access to great tools like the Exposure slider.
Still, for low light shooters who prefer shooting handheld to dragging around a full size tripod, which can really get in the way when you’re looking to capture candids, this is an amazing addition to the Photoshop arsenal, so long as it works in practice half as well as it demos in controlled conditions.
Ohter new features include a redesigned smart sharpen feature, better upsampling when you’re blowing up a lower resolution image, rounded rectangle shapes with editable corners (this has been a very annoying oversight up until now) and multi-shape and path selection, Illustrator-style. There’s also now Behance network integration built right into Photoshop CC.
As mentioned, this also marks a big shift, where it looks like we’ll see Adobe focus exclusively on the Creative Cloud releases of Photoshop in favor of numbered versions, so expect updates to arrive more like they do with something like iOS or Android, with improvements coming as needed instead of lumped into standalone larger releases. All of this comes alongside the rest of Creative Cloud’s latest version on June 17.