For well over a decade, Adobe’s Photoshop image manipulation standard has been the gold standard for those in the graphic design and publishing worlds, offering a full suite of digital tools designed to make the previously arduous task of photo editing a snap using a standard home level PC or Mac. Massive popularity has driven Photoshop to the number 1 position in its market, but the software has continued to be upgraded and expanded by developer Adobe with each passing incarnation. The latest version of the software from Adobe is called Photoshop CS5 and features the standard pairing of image composing and editing programs that offer a range of familiar and improved tools along with massive technological upgrades. Photoshop CS5 Extended provides the same sets of tools with more added in for developers and artists who may be working in either 3D medium or with content that is motion based such as animations.
Perhaps most impressive of all the new features is the heavily hyped Content Aware Fill, a tool that gathers information from the pixels surrounding a targeted portion of an image and ‘fill in’ the area with a pattern created by calculating the surrounding area’s mathematical probabilities. This means that a scene that has once included a person in a park could be altered to remove the person and fill the space left behind with a continuous shot of the park’s landscape. This alone has set the graphic design world ablaze in interest. Other improvements such as HDR toning and puppet warp further enhance the offering.
