Photoshop CS5, first impressions

Saturday, May 15, 2010, 10:31 PM
Graphic Design by John (Article #268)

I'm not the king of the earlier adopters. But, I fell head over heels for Adobe's lavish tech demo of Photoshop CS5 and made the leap.

Was it worth it? Overall, yeah.

But, the first day I was really pissed. Let's just be clear upfront about the #1 thing that's making people adopt CS5 so quickly: it's the beneficiary of a very good tech demo.

CS5, simply put, isn't as magical as the tech demo makes it look.

Take the content-aware fill, the part that still pisses me off. The tech demos for CS5 make the content-aware fill look like you can completely remove anything. And that Photoshop will figure it out by pure voodoo. In effect, the content-aware fill is supposed to be a near 100% replacement for the clone tool.

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Not even close. after using CS5 for a week, my verdict on the content-aware fill is that it's a nice tool that will amazingly . . . when CS7 hits the market in 2014.

The content-aware fill takes way too many tries to get it right. And often the results, even when decent, look more like a poorly done clone tool effort. It's simply should not have been included in a finished product.

The magic selection tool is another tech demo meant to inspire awe. The first day I dealt with it, it was a bit disappointing. Again, the Adobe tech demos make this function look like pure voodoo. Instead, it tends to go off selecting half the damned image when all you want is to select the subject's arm.

The second day with the magic select tool was a lot better. I learned quickly that it needs to be trained a bit. Frankly, Adobe would do themselves a favor to buy out a machine learning company so I'm not retraining the damned tool every time I make a selection.

What I found is that you use the additive selection tool first. If it overshoots your target, shrug it off. Come back through with the subtractive selection tool, and fix it quickly. Keep adjusting the hits and misses until your selection is right.

There's a tweak tool that was heavily demoed. In theory, it's supposed to handle things like backgrounds showing through semi-transparent thing like hair. In practice, it's a complete waste. I saw better results from third-party plug-ins for PS6! And embarrassingly bad addition to an otherwise worthwhile tool. Another part of CS5 that had no business being shipped with a commercial product.

The pseudo-HDR tool was less pimped. Too bad. It's the one that works 100% as advertised. While not a 100% replacement for doing HDR the right way, it's good. It's about a 95% replacement for real HDR. Which, if you only have one image you want to HDR, is pretty handy.

The ringing from the pseudo HDR is obnoxious, but in truth the ringing from real HDR is obnoxious, too. The different with CS5 is you can turn the ringing off.

The 3-D effects tools were also heavily touted. Here I have to hedge my response a bit. I'm used to using 3D Studio Max and Brazil render engine. Nothing CS5 was going to deliver was going to impress me.

That said, I've seen better results from pre-alpha releases of open source projects with little participation. The 3-D tools suck. Plain and simple. For real 3-D, they're worthless. They have some value insofar as they provide the means to quickly deploy 3-D into Photoshop and work it. So, if you're doing text effects, the 3-D tools are serviceable. Probably worth shipping, but not worth getting excited about unless you're trying to avoid using a serious 3-D rendering package.

For as hard as all that sounds, I think CS5 was worth acquiring. Not big time worth it, but worth it.

Mind you, for most trades Photoshop hasn't added anything of real value since Photoshop 6. If your version of PS is getting everything done for you, CS5 is hardly a must buy. But, if you're laying out the cash to buy PS anyhow, CS5 won't leave you in that downgrade from Vista-to-XP type of bad spot.

Overall, the tools have the potential. As I said: I suspect a lot of this will look mind-bendingly awesome when CS7 debuts in the middle of the decade.

Recommendation? A soft buy.

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John Crawford
Pro Content and Design