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CS6 Superguide

All the CS6 information and more is available as a PDF magazine called the CS6 Superguide. If you’re on our list, you will receive it free by email as soon as it’s available. If not, sign up now and get the CS6 Superguide for free. Or click the image below.

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Photoshop has never been known for its 3D abilities. It is really better known as Adobe’s primary-pixel-pusher. The inclusion of 3D objects and Repousse in previous versions marked interesting forays into the realm of raytraced three dimensions. But the cumbersome workflow and less than stellar results turned away many who would otherwise welcome the new tools into their production workflow. In Photoshop CS6, Adobe has taken great pains to overcome that perception. New features, enhanced workflow, and smoother, more reliable performance all come together to make the 3D features of CS6 extended something worth paying for.

Gone is the term “Repousse” and good riddance! It has been replaced with the much more sensible term, “3D extrusion.” That’s a term that even we can figure out what it means! Adobe has also created an innovative new approach to modifying the properties of the 3D elements. While using the 3D tools, objects have their own modifier displays, such as transformation cages and bevel adjustments that can be accessed right on the canvas. Even the smoothness of shadows can be adjusted by dragging on the shadow! The old slider bars are still there, but it is entirely possible to create, move, edit and adjust 3D objects without ever having to visit the panels.

This tutorial will demonstrate some of the new 3D features and workflows available in CS6. For the project, we took some inspiration from the Inception movie posters and decided to spell the word Bicubic in large letter shaped buildings within a city. (Because the bicubic smoother interpolation is used for enlarging images in Photoshop!) Fair warning, this tutorial does contain some rather advanced compositing steps that are aimed at the more experienced user, but those are not the focus of the project. The primary point is to explore the 3D features and workflow, so most of the instruction is spent on those steps.

Bicubic Tutorial Steps

Step 1 – Stock Image Selection

The success of the entire effect rests on the quality of the base image. The shot needs to be drastically vertical so the roofs and building shapes are clearly visible. A lower, more oblique angle and the letters will not be recognizable. The shot you see here is from fotolia.com (#826018). Then use the new crop tool in CS6 to trim it down to the working area shown here.

Step 2- Bicubic Buildings

Add in the text using a simple no-serif font, Arial works nice in this case. Then with the type tool still active check the Options bar for a new 3D Extrude icon. Press it and Photoshop switches to the 3D workspace and extrudes the type. Select the Bevel from the Shape presets and set the Extrusion Depth to 1.25.

Step 3 – Build a Ledge

At the bottom of the workspace, you can switch from one layout to the other, using three tiny icons which represent the Mobile size, Tablet size, and Desktop size designs. When you change from one layout to another, the corresponding CSS is applied to the document displayed in Dreamweaver’s workspace. Remember, you’re only working on one HTML file, but because Dreamweaver creates three sets of styles, you can rearrange and resize the elements to create three different layouts.

Step 4 – Turn Entire Buildings on End

With the Bicubic 3D text still targeted press the 4th icon in the properties panel for Coordinates. Enter 90 into the X rotation field to turn the letters up on their end. Then go to the 3D menu and choose Snap Object to Ground Plane.

Step 5 – A Different Perspective

Click on the Current View line in the 3D panel and make sure the Move Tool is active. Photoshop immediately activates the 3D camera tools. Use these to rotate, pan, and zoom around the scene until the buildings fit into the proper perspective.

Step 6 – Break up the Block

Currently the entire word is considered one single mesh to Photoshop. In order to assign different textures and properties to the individual buildings, they must each be a unique 3D element. To do this go to 3D>Split Extrusion. Notice in the 3D panel that Photoshop creates a separate 3D object for each letter.

Step 7 – Create Textures

Now it’s time to turn some attention to the texture maps. Open the original stock image again and find a clear, unobstructed view of a building side. Create a selection of that side and copy it to a new document. Then use the new Perspective Crop tool (found behind the regular Crop Tool) click on each corner of the map and the tool will remove the perspective and square off the texture. Continue with this process until you have enough side and roof textures for each building.

Step 8 – Basic Texture Mapping

Back in the project file, open up the 3D object layers in the 3D panel until you can see the Material entries. Select the “B Front Inflation Material” and in the Properties Panel click on the document icon next to the Diffuse attribute. Load one of the roof materials to map here. Use the same method to map a side texture to the Extrusion material. For the Bevel material, click on the color chip to assign a color that can be sampled from the adjoining textured surface. Continue on until all the letters are fully mapped.

Step 9 – Move the Sun

Select the “Infinite Light 1 item” in the 3D panel and use the on-canvas editor to adjust the light direction to match the base city image, so the light is coming from the top left. Use the Add Light icon (in the base of the 3D panel) to create another infinite light to serve as a fill light. Reduce the intensity of this light and align it to light up the shadow areas so they are not fully black.

Step 10 – There’s a Render Button!

Press the Render button (no more quality drop down menu to start a render!) in the base of the Properties panel and wait as Photoshop renders out the image. Depending on your system strength this might take a while. Notice that CS6 even has a Time Remaining status bar in the lower left corner.

Step 11 – Let’s Start Compositing

At this point you can Rasterize the 3D layer (Layer>Rasterize>3D) to make it available for filters and painting tools that will help in the compositing process. Next, use the Pen Tool to trace around the foreground buildings. Make the full path go up and around the rendered buildings and use the path as a vector mask on the 3D buildings. The new letters should tuck nicely in behind the foreground buildings.

Step 12 – Shuffle Buildings Around

The background image needs some adjustments so the render fits seamlessly into it. Duplicate the layer and work on the copy. Create a selection around the tall white building in the lower right. Use the New Content Aware Move tool to shorten the building so it doesn’t obscure the new buildings. Otherwise, Clone Stamping and Content Aware Fill are the primary tools for this step to remove or relocate buildings that are in the way of the new letter buildings. Simulated shadows can be created by creating a feathered selection and using the burn tool.

Step 13 – Lighting Adjustment

It’s unlikely the rendered lighting will exactly match the background image, so use a Curves adjustment layer to correct any discrepancies. Clip the adjustment layer to the rendered layer by pressing the first icon at the base of the Properties panel. Clip a Shadow layer on top of this (by holding down the alt/opt key while clicking between the layers) and use a black to transparent linear gradient to add shadows to the base of the buildings.

Step 14 – Collect the Roof Clutter

While the rendered textures for the roofs are impressive, they don’t quite look photo realistic. Create a new Roof Patch group for each building to start copying additional architectural elements from elsewhere in the image. Open the original stock photo and use it as the source for the Clone Stamp Tool to clone elements into the project file. There are plenty of cranes, AC units and vents available to choose from!

Step 15 – Highlight Blowout

The original photo is a little overexposed. To match that condition create a merged layer at the top of the layer stack by holding down the alt/opt key and going to Layer>Merge Visible. Then ctrl/cmd click the rendered layer’s thumbnail to load that shape as a selection. Hold down alt+ctrl+shift (opt+cmd+shift) and click the mask thumbnail to intersect this with the mask shape. Use the resulting selection as a mask on the merged layer. Set the blending mode to linear dodge and reduce the opacity to around 50%.

Step 16 – Final Effects

Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to the top of the stack. Check the colorize box and adjust the sliders to get a sepia hue (39, 32, -1 works well). Add a Vignette layer on top and fill it with 50% grey through the Edit>Fill command. Run the Lens Correction filter and look in the custom tab for the slider to add a dark vignette. Finally set the blend mode to Overlay to make the grey invisible.

Remember, the key to creating responsive designs is to position the same divs for best display in each of the three layouts. For example, in the mobile version, the best practice is to create a single-column layout, but in the tablet and desktop versions, you may want to position the same divs to create two or more columns.

Here is the Final Image.

Other Helpful Tips

Get some Help from Vanishing Point
It can be somewhat challenging to get the 3D ground plane to match the photo perspective. Here’s a tip that can help. First create a new layer and go to the Vanishing Point filter. Draw out a grid that matches the ground of the photo. In the options flyout menu, select Render Grids to Photoshop. Then press OK and you will have a grid to help visually align your 3D Ground Plane!

Render selection
It’s likely that the initial setup of textures and lighting isn’t exactly what you want. Chances are you will need to render a few times to tweak settings to get everything just right. Don’t waste time rendering the entire scene time and time again. Create a selection of the area you are working on before pressing the render button. Photoshop renders only the selected pixels. This can be a huge time saver!

Secondary 3D view
CS6 includes several new interface elements when working with 3D. One of the most helpful is a secondary view of the 3D object. Go to View>Show>3d Secondary View to get the floating window showing the 3D object from another perspective. This can be extremely useful when positioning objects and lights.

Creating Texture Maps
Texture mapping is an art unto itself! The basic idea here is to copy a portion of the photo and use it as a wrapper on the 3D element. To make sure the texture maps are seamless, use the Offset filter (Filter>Other>Offset) to wrap the texture around the canvas sides so you can see how the edges join together.

Editing UV properties
If a texture appear stretched or squashed when applied to the building sides, the UV properties need to be adjusted. Frequently a texture needs to be repeated many times as it wraps all the way around the building. Click on the same icon used to load the texture map and select Edit UV Properties. This brings up the Texture Properties. Adjust the scale and offset values needed.

Clone from a Different Document
Did you know the clone tool can source from one document and paint in another? While creating the architectural elements for the roof “clutter” in this project, open the source stock image side by side with the project file. With the Clone Stamp tool alt/opt click in the stock image and then go to the project file to paint. Photoshop clones pixels from one document to another!

Conclusion

This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential of the new 3D features in Photoshop CS6. The very same technique used here to map a texture to a diffuse color of an object can be used to control many other properties of the 3D objects. Specular maps can be used to make certain areas appear shiny while others are matte. Opacity maps control the visibility of a surface; these can be utilized to create invisible areas or holes in a surface that would not be possible to create otherwise. Mapping a grunge texture to the Roughness property can go a long way to breaking up the perfect computer generated appearance of a rendered surface. The list goes on and on.
The possibilities don’t end with the texture mapping either. The extrusion options are not limited to a straight extrude with a beveled edge. The twist and bend extrusions make it possible to create springs or twisted shapes. The revolve extrusion allows for easy creation of rounded objects like glasses or bottles. Additionally, Photoshop can import several popular 3d files from other packages to work with as well. The support of improved reflections and refractions, Image Based Lighting, as well as in-camera depth of field makes it possible to create photorealistic renders in Photoshop, it’s easier than we ever imagined.
Most 3D artists will tell you that 90% of their rendered work ends up in Photoshop anyway. When time is money and you are on a deadline, it is much easier and faster to clone out a stray polygon or make lighting corrections with curves than it is to tweak a setting and re-render an entire scene again. So being able to create or edit 3D work in the same program used to retouch it means fewer return trips between applications and less digging through folders to find the correct rendered file. This streamlines and consolidates the production pipeline.

Photoshop’s 3D features are now worthy of being noticed. If you’ve never tried them before, now is the time. With CS6, these tools have leveled up!

About the Author

Kirk Nelson. Kirk is an Adobe Certified Expert, Freelance Author, Trainer, Speaker, Friendly Neighborhood Graphics Geek.

CS6 Superguide

All the CS6 information and more is available as a PDF magazine called the CS6 Superguide. If you’re on our list, you will receive it free by email as soon as it’s available. If not, sign up now and get the CS6 Superguide for free.

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Welcome to our CS6 launch site. We have gathered the best talent in the industry to discuss the new Creative Suite 6 in-depth. Enjoy the new feature notes, reviews and tutorials.

Creative Cloud

For more on Creative Cloud, check out our CC learning site

There has been a lot ofmisunderstanding about how to buy your Creative Suite, CS6 products.

While Adobe has released the Creative Cloud, the option to buy individual products or Suites remains the same. You can still order a boxed copy from Adobe or resellers, you can still buy a download if you prefer. There is still upgrade pricing available etc. Just like always. So if you are a person who prefers to own, or only have the need for a single product, this might be the best way for you to go.

For those who decide on the Creative Cloud, this is what it looks like.

There are two main areas that will interest you. One is files. This is where you can keep your images and files on the cloud (Adobe’s servers). You have 20 GB to play with.

The Apps, what you get and what you don’t get

The part that you will care about the most right now is the Apps tab. Here is where accessis granted to all the Adobe Apps from the Creative Suite Master collection. They Don’t RUN from the cloud, the license server does. When you run programs (apps), they check with the Creative Cloud to make sure your subscription is active. As long as it’s active, you can run all the programs. As far as I know, the cloud apps will run on 2 machines, just like the Current Adobe apps. The difference is, you can run one on Mac and one on Windows if you prefer.

The apps need to be downloaded to your local computer and they install just like they always have. This is how it works, first of all the Adobe Application Manager is downloaded. The app manager runs on your desktop and lists all the available apps. Simply click install to download and install. You can choose several products at a time and they will download and install one at a time. Installation is painless and runs in the background. I selected all the apps and went out for dinner. When I returned, they were all installed. The process was painless for me. Apps are launched from your dock or desktop, just like any other app.

Extras

You also have access to Business Catalyst, which is a no-program website you can set up for yourself either through Dreamweaver or Muse. You can have up to 5 feature rich sites with a subscription (This used to be called Goodbarry, before an Adobe acquisition). You also have access to typekit, a service which serves up web fonts, for adding something more interesting to your website than arial.

All the touch apps are listed on the page too, but they aren’t included, you have to purchase them separately.

To cloud or not to cloud?

So, I guess you will be looking for a recommendation from me?

Adobe’ pricing on Creative Cloud is $49.99 per month. This includes all the Creative Suite Apps as well as 20 Gb hosting, and storage. Create Suite CS3,4 and 5 users can get the Creative Cloud for $29.99 per month for the first year.

It’s not a cut and dry answer. For me, it represents great value because I use almost all the apps in the suite on both Mac and Windows, so it makes a lot of sense. For those who don’t already own the latest version of the Suite, it’s a great way to get into all the Adobe products for essentially $50 a month. That’s $600 a year.

If you already own a current suite, look at the upgrade price and them compare it to 18months-2 years between upgrades at $600 a year and see what makes sense to you. Also bear in mind,if you are a current Creative Suite owner, once you commit to the cloud, it might be a permemant decision, you could forefit your upgrade pricing should you decide to go back to the boxed product for CS7. Also decide if you need Business Catalyst, typekit and the 20 Gb cloud storage. (Cloud Storage and webfonts can be had for free from Google).Of course, the biggie will be how well Adobe integrates the cloud with the apps in useful ways for sharing and team workflows. We will report on that as features roll out.

My advise is simple, look at your needs, do the math and make your decision accordingly. Don’t make your decision based on the $29.99 introductory offer, because you are in this for the long haul.

(update) Don’t forget about the new Photography plan for CC: The Creative Cloud Photography plan. Only $9.99mo for Photoshop, Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile.

CS6 Superguide

All the CS6 information and more is available as a PDF magazine called the CS6 Superguide. If you’re on our list, you will receive it free by email as soon as it’s available. If not, sign up now and get the CS6 Superguide for free.

The post CS6 Superguide by photoshopCAFE appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.

At this time there are 2 options for Photoshop. You can subscribe to the Creative Cloud and get the latest Photoshop CC for a monthly fee (See all the new features added in CC here). If you would rather buy Photoshop, then CS6 available. This isn’t widely known, because you wont find it on the Adobe site. However, if you want to buy CS6, you have to call into Adobe sales and order it. Here are all the new features added in Photoshop CS6.

All the videos related to this page can be viewed here

User Interface.

The first thing you will notice when you first open Photoshop CS6, is the new look. There is a new dark User Interface. It’s a bit of a culture shock at first, but once you get used to it, it’s really great. There are four different flavors of it and you can change them all in the preferences menu. Yes, the old familiar light interface is one of the options. I suggest giving the dark ones a go though, you might just love them. You can also press the Shift+F1 orF2 keys to cycle through the new colors.
Another thing, you might not notice at first is that the look and feel of the panels have been tightened up and now more consistent naming is used throughout.

Properties Panel.

If you are used to looking at the Masks Panel, the Adjustment controls for Adjustment layers and the 3D options, they have all been consolidated into a Properties panel. This helps reduce clutter.

When you go into the filters menu, you might think a lot of filters are gone. Actually it’s just the clutter that’s gone, all the missing filters are tucked away under the Filter Gallery.
Definitely worth mentioning is Preferences can now be imported and exported. This is great for people with lots of custom brushes, shapes, actions etc. I know, I have several computers and it’s difficult to move them all over manually, and I always lose a few when I upgrade to a new version of Photoshop. Photoshop CS6 offers the option to migrate old presets over on launch; I have to say that I love it!

Blur Gallery (Tilt-Shift, Iris and Field) Redesigned tools

A new set of Blur filters, called the Blur Gallery hold a little more than meets the eye. They are all special effects… blurs that simulate different kinds of lens effects. We may as well start-off with what I predict will be the big one: Tilt-shift. The tilt-shift blur, adds a blur to the entire image, but retains a narrow strip of focus. This is similar to what you would get using a tilt shift lens at an angle, the result is that it makes things look like miniatures. Its best to use a bird’s eye view, looking down at an angle without any horizon. Add this filter; adjust the blur and the drag to set the angle and area to be in focus. This is a lot of fun and the fun intensifies when you make changes to the light Bokeh. You can have bright areas blown out with splashes of color, or just a tinge of white to simulate out-of-focus specular highlights.

The Iris Blur allows you to position a circle on your image, the center of the circle is in focus and the pointers around it can be moved to define an in-focus region, which can be round or square, or a variation. The focus quickly falls off to a blur. This effect somewhat simulated what you would get with a Lensbaby type bellows lens.
The third in the gallery is the field blur. This is a quick way to simulate depth of field. You can set two points at different amounts of blur. A smooth blend of blur will be created between the two points, You are supposed to set one point blurry and the other one sharp and move them around to create a smooth blend. Of course there is nothing stopping you from adding blurs to both and going for a creative style effect.

All of the blurs also have the option to set a Bokeh style highlight, which is either a specular white or a saturated color.

Tilt-Shift Effect.

Adaptive Wide Angle

An interesting addition to the warp-style effects. This line is designed to straighten out barreled images and in particular panoramas. If you have ever stitched any panos together, I’m sure you have noticed that they can get really distorted and wavy. Using the adaptive wide angle, drag out a line and Photoshop straightens the photo to make the line level. Apply several lines to a panorama and you can either straighten in completely, or turn it into a mess. (This one take a little practice to master, but is super useful when you have it tamed).

Crop

The Crop tool is nothing short of amazing. It’s all GPU accelerated, which means that everything happen onscreen and it’s fast! You can view the crop overlays and position your image within the crop bounds and even rotate it right on screen. You have to see this realize just how cool it is.

Perspective crop tool

In addition to the crop tool, there is a perspective crop tool. Position this over an image and pull each corner out at different angles. This makes it possible to crop a crooked, perspective, photograph, and make it perfectly straight in just a few seconds. Truly amazing and super useful!

Content Aware

The content aware magic continues. I’m sure you remember Content Aware Scale in CS4 and Content Aware Fill in CS5. Now Photoshop CS6 Beta has a new tool called Content Aware Move. This is a great tool for a couple of things. If you want to take a small element from an image and reposition it, this tool does a great job. However if you want to get a bit more creative, you can stretch and reshape objects with the tool. The key is in using the correct option in the option bar. With the Content Aware Move tool selected (under the Spot Healing Brush). Choose either the Move or the Extend option from the Options bar. You will also notice some options in the adaption menu in the options bar, choose strict or loose depending on the result you want, strict and very strict won’t alter the image as much as loose or very loose.
Also noteworthy is the patch tool now has a content aware option. Very nice for filling in larger areas and having more control over the fill content. Simply choose the path, switch it to Content Aware and then move it over a nice “clean” area. The texture from the new area will seamlessly blend into the patch area. I personally love this one!

Lighting Effects

Lighting effects is back! It was missing in 64-bit versions of CS5 because it was just that, only in 32-bit. It’s been completely rebuilt and works directly on screen now, and not just in a tiny floating panel. The good news is that it now works in 16-bit per Channel Mode. This is great for adding different types of lighting effects to images. Sadly 16-bit mode doesn’t do much for illustration in Alpha channels (Anyone familiar with my Photoshop illustration workflow will know what I mean). When you apply the effect to an alpha channel, the banding is really bad. I’m disappointed because I was hoping to up the ante with my illustrations. Better off to keep using it in 8-bit mode for illustration. Anyone who isn’t creating 3D style effects with Lighting effects and channels will love the new filter though because it’s speedy and easy to use.

Liquify

Liquify has had a real nitro boost this time around. It’s all GPU boosted too. This means that the performance is fast. I found it to be amazingly fast. Liquefying is smooth and fluid. When you push the tools, the image moves with you, unlike in the past where there was a lag and then a sluggish movement of pixels. This performance provides a lot more control over the warping. Also brush size keyboard shortcuts are added, the familiar [ & ] keys that we use for regular brush size, now control Liquify brushes. As an added bonus, the maximum brush size is greatly increased to match today’s larger document sizes.

Warp Transform

This has also gotten a major speed boost. These isn’t any new functionality, just speed, which is always a good thing.

Puppet Warp

The puppet warp now works directly onscreen. You don’t have to work in a dialog box; this is great because it’s a distraction to be suddenly taken to a dialog box. It’s also more accurate and faster, all of this thanks to advances in GPU.

Color Range

Worth mentioning, the color range Select>Color Range, now has a face detection, in other words, it now selected skin tones along with it’s other options.

Painting

Nice new additions to speed performance are the new erodible tips for brushes. These create some nice realistic looking strokes and can also be wrangled for some nice grunge effects. Airbrushes also get some new tips that respond well to tilt with a Wacom pen. I can see a lot of potential with these.
There is also an Oil painter filter that came over from Pixel Bender. This allows you to paint over a photograph and produce some surprisingly realistic oil painting looks.
Small thing, maximum brush size has now been increased to 5,000 pixels. This is good for an overlay of a Photo (without hard edges) from something like a Canon 5D.

JDI Brushes
One thing I always found frustrating is when you are trying to sample a color and there are adjustment layers on it. You sample the color and begin painting and it’s wrong because it had the adjustments added to the sample. You now have the option to sample a color and ignore the adjustment layers. On top of that you can also sample, current layer, all layers and new is current layer and beneath. (Also current and beneath, no adjustments).

Layers panel

When you first see the Layers panel, it’s obvious that something has changed. Not so obvious at first glance though, is how much.
Layer filtering has been added. For someone who can work with hundreds of layers, this is so awesome! You can filter by kind (default). These options include images, adjustments, text, vector layers and smart objects. There are also other categories such as name, effect, mode, attribute and color. There is a long list of attributes that include visible, advanced blending and more. Text is interesting because you can search by layer name. I know a lot of people don’t name their layers, but most pros that use a lot of layers always name at least certain key layers. Now if you are a photographer or painter and only use half a dozen or so layers, this isn’t a big deal. If you are an illustrator, designer or compositor, filtering will save you a ton of time. Speaking of layer names, when renaming layers, press the tab key to advance to the next layer and fill out its name too.

New vector layers.

Designers are going to be thrilled about this one. Vector layers are redesigned. You can now define a stroke and a fill for any vector layers including the pen tool and shape layers. The fills can be solid, patterns or gradients. The strokes can be solid, patterns or gradients too. Check this out, yes; there are now dotted and dashed strokes available!

Other things with Layers.,

You can now collapse or expand all the layer groups by holding down the Cmd/Ctrl and click the disclosure triangle. You can show/Hide all Layer style details by holding down Alt/Option and clicking the arrows.
You can apply a layer style and flatten the layer in a single click. Also, Layer Styles render in the correct order with shadows on the bottom.
Gradient Layer Styles now include a dither option; this is nice and helps to prevent banding.
You can now do batch tasks to multiple layers at once. For example, applying Layer Styles, Color Labels and locking Layers. There is now an indicator to let you know if advanced blending options are used (Blend if), double click the icon to open the blending dialog box.

Typography

There have been a lot of significant changes with type in Photoshop CS6 beta.
The biggest thing is type styles. You can create and use both character and paragraph based type styles. This has been a long time coming, as the typography tools have gotten better in Photoshop, it’s always been a pain to have to duplicate styles all the time. Sure there are some neat tricks and work-arounds, but you no longer need those, full-blown type styles are here. Define your font, color, size and more. You can now apply those saved styles to both individual text blocks and also to paragraph text.
Photoshop CS6 now supports custom ligatures, so you can add those nice pairing of characters as well as different alternative characters, when the font supports them.
Another cool addition is Lorem Ipsum. You can now fill paragraphs with placeholder text, so that you can mock up and see what a layout would look like without having to fill with actual text. This is nice, because you no longer have to cut and paste placeholder text from elsewhere.
Smaller things with type include better type rendering, snap to pixels, so you don’t have a soft edge because it’s half way on a pixel as well as new dictionaries.

Scripted Patterns

You can get some really cool patterns using the scripted fills. Select a pattern fill, like you would for any texture fill. The difference is, you can choose a scripted fill to lay out the tiles in different ways rather than just the standard tiling. You can do bricks, weaves, spirals and more. If you know some scripting, you can even design some of your own.

ACR 7

With the recent release of Lightroom 4, there was a slightly broken workflow between Lightroom and Photoshop. That missing link was ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). All the settings are now nicely synchronized with Lightroom 4, so that round trip editing is now a possibility again. For those of you who don’t use Lightroom, here are the main changes to ACR develop module.

Shadow Highlight

There is a new RAW processing engine called PV 2012 (Process Version). The main change is dropping of the Brightness, Recovery and Fill Light sliders.
The sliders have largely been replaced with Shadow, Highlight, Whites and Blacks. These are more consistent with what we are used to working with in Photoshop. Shadow Highlight replaces Recovery and fill light with some changes to try and eliminate halos in images that are heavenly processed. The Whites and Black set the white and black points in the histogram, much like what you would expect from the white and black slider in Photoshop levels. Having used these for a while, I’m a big fan of the new Process Version.

(See the video of this is action at our Lightroom page – http://photoshopcafe.com/lightroom)
Using these sliders is very intuitive; PV 2012 produces good results without much effort. See the image I quickly ran through it.

Check out the video on processing images in Lightroom 4

But wait. It gets really cool about here. More options have been added to local corrections (Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter) these include White Balance, moiré, noise, shadows and Highlights. Wait, did I just say Moiré? There is now a moiré reduction filter, which works really well. Having used the Sony NEX and Lumix GF series of Micro 4/3 cameras, I have noticed moiré patterns sneaking into some photographs. While this dithering effect might be a nice novelty for a second, I have a feeling the moiré reduction will be a popular feature.

Video

see the video demo
With the widespread adoption of video on DSLR cameras and even iPhone style devices, everyone is shooting video now.
Adobe reworked the video features. You will notice that the timeline has a new look. Window>Timeline.
Bring video in as a video layer and Photoshop treats it much like the other layers. The big difference is that the video layers contain multiple frames of video. When you reorder the layers in the Layers panel, their order will also change in the timeline. In time speak, the layers start at the bottom and work their way up the panel, with the last clip being the top-most. If you prefer different video tracks, this can be accomplished by creating a new layer group. Each group has its own video track. The timeline will also auto adjust to accommodate longer video as it’s added.
Now, this isn’t as powerful or as fast as Premiere Pro, but it’s powerful enough for you to edit some video. It’s easy to cut the track and set in and out points, by dragging the beginning or ends (Heads and tails) of clips. You can even add transitions between different clips. Transitions are added by dropping a transition point on the clip. You can change the type and length of the transition at any time.

Where it gets really good is adding effects. You can apply all the same smart filters to video as you would to images, so you can really knock out some professional looks. Speaking of looks you can apply common Color Look Up Table presets to get professional video looks of your video, this is named LUT presets. Don’t forget you can still animate text, shapes and images over the top of your videos to create some cool lower thirds and callouts, title screens etc. Photoshop has supported different video pixel aspect rations for years. I’m sure a lot of people will have a ton of fun with the video features and I suspect a few will hunger for more and migrate their way over to Premiere Pro or Production Premium.
As for output, you can output either video or image sequences.

I have 2 premium videos for you to learn video in Photoshop

Video in Photoshop CS6 A photographer and designers guide

Making Movies in Photoshop CC

Smaller Changes

Rich Cursor support: The cursor displays information like coordinates, image size etc., during many of the functions, such as moving scaling, cropping and more.
Many of you will be happy to know that the Contact Sheet II plugin and the PDF Presentation are both back in Photoshop. I guess people weren’t too thrilled about their move to Bridge. They are much more convenient right in Photoshop.
While we are on the cool little things. Many people will be glad to hear that Photoshop now has an auto save and auto recover feature. When PS crashes (oops I mean when someone trips a power overload), it attempts to recover the previous image at the point of the last save. Now that will be a lifesaver and I wish I’d had it back in the day when I was working in a building with flakey power that would suddenly cut off.
Mini Bridge now has a Filmstrip mode. This is great for snapping to the bottom of the screen.
Auto correction in levels and in curves is more intelligent now and people should get better results from it.
We now have support for 10 bit monitors. Oh, I want to get me one of those!
When resizing layers using the ole’ faithful Ctrl/Cmd+t free transform, you now have the option to choose different bicubic interpolation modes. Choose bicubic sharper if you are scaling down and bicubic softer if you are scaling up.

3D

A lot of new stuff has happened around 3D.
Repossue has been removed and everything now works on screen. You can create geometry from paths, text and shapes.
The tools are now easier to use, with on screen icons for most tasks.

Here are a few exaqmples of what I was able to create using Photoshop CS6 Beta 3D. The image of the pens and ruler were created entirely with the available 3D tools. The other two images were models I created in Maya and then imported, textured and composited in Photoshop.

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With all the hype around HTML5, CSS3, and responsive design, it’s no surprise that the hottest new features in Dreamweaver CS6 are all aimed at making it easier for web designers to create pages that adapt to small and large screens and use the latest flavors of HTML and CSS.

From the relatively minor addition of the new Web Fonts Manager, to the significant addition of the Fluid Grid Layout system, there are many reasons to upgrade to Dreamweaver CS6.

In this article, I’ll review the most significant changes you’ll find in this version of Dreamweaver, and offer a few tips and techniques to help you put them to work right away.

Creating Responsive Designs with Fluid Grid Layouts

The most impressive new feature in Dreamweaver CS6 — and the one that’s sure to get the most ‘buzz’ — is the new Fluid Grid Layout system.

If you’re still trying to understand why you’d even need a Fluid Grid Layout and what responsive design (sometimes called adaptive design) is all about, consider this: Today’s web pages are as likely to be viewed on a tiny smartphone screen as they are to be displayed on a 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display.

Although you could create multiple versions of your website, each optimized to fit a different screen size, that’s a complicated and highly inefficient solution to a problem that’s only going get worse as people connect to the Internet with everything from wristwatches to refrigerators.

Responsive Design offers a far more elegant solution by creating one page that adapts to different screen sizes. Essentially, you create one HTML document and then use multiple sets of CSS rules to rearrange and resize the images, div tags, and other elements on that page to fit different screen sizes. As a browser identifies the size of each screen that visits your site, the corresponding set of style rules is automatically applied based on a media query. The @media rule for media queries is not new, web designers have long used it to associate an alternate set of styles when a web page is sent to a printer.

Dreamweaver’s new Fluid Grid Layout gives you a head start on a complex design strategy. Like most responsive designs, a fluid grid layout includes three sets of style rules:

• A small design optimized for mobile phones (and people with “fat fingers”);
• A large design that fills even the largest computer monitors and takes advantage of all that screen real estate; and
• A mid-sized design optimized for iPads and other tablets.

When you use Dreamweaver’s Fluid Grid Layouts, media queries are created for you, based on the size of each device. Here’s what the media query looks like for a tablet device (note that the first line is a comment):

/* Tablet Layout: 481px to 768px. Inherits styles from: Mobile Layout. */
@media only screen and (min-width: 481px)

How to use Dreamweaver’s Fluid Grid Layouts

You’ll find the new Fluid Grid Layout option under the File menu. You’ll also find it in a new category in the New Document Window. The steps that follow will get you started with this new, adaptable approach to web design.

Step 1

Choose File > New and in the New Document Window, select the Fluid Grid Layout category. In this dialog, you can change the number of columns that make up the grid for each of the three target sizes, you can specify the percent of the column width that is used in each of the margins between columns, and you can specify the total percentage of the browser window that will be filed by the grid layout. You can also use the DocType drop-down to select the version of HTML you want to use.

Step 2

When you click Create, Dreamweaver prompts you to first save a CSS file that includes the initial styles for the page. Simultaneously, Dreamweaver saves a boilerplate CSS style sheet, and a Javascript file, which are listed in the top of the workspace. Note that the HTML file that Dreamweaver generates is not saved in this initial step.

Step 3

At the bottom of the workspace, you can switch from one layout to the other, using three tiny icons which represent the Mobile size, Tablet size, and Desktop size designs. When you change from one layout to another, the corresponding CSS is applied to the document displayed in Dreamweaver’s workspace. Remember, you’re only working on one HTML file, but because Dreamweaver creates three sets of styles, you can rearrange and resize the elements to create three different layouts.

Step 4

You can change the display size of any of the target devices by clicking on the Window Size arrow at the bottom of the workspace, and selecting a preset screen size. Window sizes can be edited in the Window Sizes category of the Preferences dialog.

Step 5

You can add text and insert images into your pages as you would any other web page, but to take best advantage of the automated features in these fluid grid layouts, you should only add div tags by using the Insert Fluid Grid Layout Div tag, available from the Layout Insert Panel. Also note, you cannot nest Layout Div tags in your Fluid Grid designs, and that all of your layout div tags need to be contained within the main div tag on the page, which is formatted with the a class style gridContainer.

Step 6

As you add Fluid Grid Layout divs, you can resize them by clicking and dragging on the corners of each div. As you resize them, the divs will automatically snap to the closest grid line. Warning: If you view the corresponding styles that are automatically created in code view, you will see that the sizes are specified to the fourth decimal point, like this: width: 48.2758%. Resist the urge to round off these numbers. If you change these numbers in code view, Dreamweaver will no longer automatically adjust them for you.
Tip: When you resize a layout div by dragging from right to left, you make the div physically smaller. When you drag from left to right, you add margin space to the left side.

Step 7

To create multiple columns, click on the small arrow to the right of any resized div. After a div is moved up, a new arrow appears in the bottom left that you can use to move it back down.

Remember, the key to creating responsive designs is to position the same divs for best display in each of the three layouts. For example, in the mobile version, the best practice is to create a single-column layout, but in the tablet and desktop versions, you may want to position the same divs to create two or more columns.

Using Dreamweaver’s New Web Fonts Manager

Another welcome addition to the world of web design is the ability to use almost any font to format the text on your pages. However, before I tell you about the new Web Fonts Manager in Dreamweaver CS6, I should warn you that you may not need it. In the ever-evolving way of the web, there are two basic ways to work with fonts:

• Host the fonts on your own web server
• Link to fonts hosted on someone else’s server

If you use the fonts at Typekit.com, which was recently acquired by Adobe, you don’t need host your own fonts and, as a result, you won’t need the new Web Fonts Manager in Dreamweaver. With Adobe Typekit, you create a collection of the fonts you want to use at Typekit.com, then simply use them in your styles. When you publish your pages to a server, the fonts are automatically made available.

You only need Dreamweaver’s new Web Fonts Manager if you host your own fonts on your own server. There are two challenges with this option: first, you need the legal rights not only to use the font, but to publish it to a web server (check the fine print), and second, you have to host each font in four different versions if you want your fonts to display properly in all of the latest web browsers on both Mac and Windows. You can solve all of the challenges of managing font formats and rights if you use a service such as FontSquirrel.

Step 1

Download one of the many @fontface font kits from FontSquirrel.com and unzip the font folder.

Step 2

Choose Modify > Web Fonts, and click on the Add Font button in the Web Fonts Manager dialog window.

Step 3

Select each of the font types using the Edit Web Font dialog. FontSquirrel’s font kits come complete with all four of the font types you’ll need. If you save all four font types in one folder, Dreamweaver makes it easy to link to all of them at once. Just select the first by clicking on the small folder icon in Edit Web Font dialog, and Dreamweaver will find and load all four types automatically

Step 4

Use the font in a style rule definition. Any fonts you add using the Web Fonts Manager are automatically included in the Font-family drop-down list in the CSS Rule definition dialog. This makes it easy to add those fonts to your style rule definitions.

Step 5

After you define a style rule that uses your fancy new font, you can apply that style as you’d apply any other style in Dreamweaver. Just remember that you won’t see that font displayed in Dreamweaver until you click the Live button at the top left of the workspace, or preview the page in a web browser.

Step 6

When you add fonts using the Web Font Manager, Dreamweaver automatically creates a webfonts folder and stores them in your local site folder. Make sure that when you upload the page where the font appears, you also upload the webfonts folder to your server.

Creating CSS Transitions

One of the most eye-catching aspects of CSS3 is the ability to create transitions. With CSS3 Transitions, you can change a style property from one state to another, over a specified period of time. You can create dramatic effects by using Transitions, such as making an image disappear quickly, or slowly fade away, when someone clicks on it. You can even create simple animations by changing the position of an image (or everything in a div tag) from one location on a page to another using a Transition.

You can set up Transitions with a variety of triggers, including the active link state (on mouse click) or hover link (on mouse over), and you can use Transitions to make common actions on a web page happen more smoothly. For example, instead of having a link change color from blue to yellow when a visitor rolls a cursor over it, you can transition through a series of colors. Similarly, you can use a Transition to make a drop-down menu ease open, instead of popping open in one abrupt action.

One of my favorite uses of a CSS Transition is to create a cross-fade between two photographs. You used to have to use JavaScript and a lot of complicated code to create a fade, but thanks to CSS3, you can now achieve this effect by placing one image on top of another and then gradually reducing the opacity of the first image from 100% to 0.

Dreamweaver CS6 adds two new features to help you create CSS3 Transitions: a new CSS Transitions panel, and a new Transitions Category in the CSS Rules Definition dialog. As with anything in CSS3, there are a few steps to setting up a cross-fade.

Step 1

Insert two images into the same place on a page. To achieve this overlapping of images, I inserted a div tag into the page and inserted both, one above the other, using Insert > Image. Here’s what the code looks like:

Step 2

To position one image above the other and set up the opacity, I defined these corresponding styles in my style sheet.
.photo-transition {position: relative; height: 317px; width: 430px;}
.photo-transition img {position: absolute; left: 0; opacity: 1;}

Step 3

With my images in place, I opened the CSS Transitions panel by choosing Window > CSS Transitions. Like other panels, it can be floated on the screen or docked at the side. I find it fits in well with the CSS Styles and AP Elements panels.
To create a new transition, click the plus (+) in the CSS Transitions panel, and the New Transition dialog opens.

Step 4

As you can see in this figure, I selected the style .photo-transition img that I had already created as the target rule. Then, I used the Transition On drop-down list to set the transition to begin on mouse over by choose hover. I set the Duration to 1 second, the timing function to ease-in-out, and the end value to 0.

Note that because I’d already set the opacity in the style to 1, setting the End value for the Opacity property to 0 is what causes the top photo to fade out when a visitor rolls a cursor over the image.

Photo credit: Tower Bridge photos from istockphoto.com.

Step 5

In this figure, note how the second image becomes visible when the transition is complete. In the code, shown in the left side of this figure, you can see that Dreamweaver has created the CSS needed for all four of most popular web browsers using their respective browser prefixes: webkit for Google Chrome and Apple Safari, moz for Mozilla Firefox, ms for Microsoft Internet Explorer, and O for Opera.

Step 6

You can further refine your transitions using the CSS Transitions category in the CSS Rule definition dialog. This dialog includes an All animatable properties checkbox, which you can use to apply the Transition to multiple properties at once.

Creating Text Shadows, Gradients, and Rounded Corners

Although Adobe included these features for the most popular CSS3 design options to Dreamweaver CS5.5, I wanted to include a few quick tips about how to use them in this SuperGuide, because many Dreamweaver users skipped version CS5.5, and I don’t want you to miss these important additions when you upgrade to CS6.

You can create class or ID styles with text shadows or drop shadows, and you can add shadows to existing HTML elements by defining a tag style, such as the style I created for the

tag to create the text-shadow on the words Tower Bridge in this figure.

Creating Text Shadows

When you create rules that include text shadows you can specify up to four values. The horizontal and vertical fields specify the distance the drop shadow extends below (horizontal) and to the sides (vertical) of the text. The blur radius specifies the amount of blur in the shadow. The color of the shadow can be defined using a hexadecimal color code or as an RGBa color code.

You can add a text shadow using the Property pane at the bottom of the CSS Styles panel, as shown in this figure. To do so, follow these steps:

Step 1

Click to select the name of a style in the CSS styles panel.

Step 2

Click the Add Property link in the left side of the CSS Styles Property pane

Step 3

Select the property name, text-shadow, from the drop-down list, or type it into the field.

Step 4

After the name appears in the left side of the pane, a small arrow appears on the right. Click to select the arrow and open the text-shadow settings.

Step 5

Enter the X and Y offsets, blur radius, and color, and press Return/Enter. Note: you can have the text shadow appear above or to the left of the text by entering negative numbers, such as -3, in the X and Y fields.

Dreamweaver automatically generates the CSS3 code that creates that text shadow and includes it in the selected style rule definition.

Creating Rounded Corners and other CSS3 Styles

Similarly, if you want to add rounded corners to a style, or almost any other CSS3 style rule, you first select the name of an existing style in the CSS Styles panel, then click Add Property in the CSS Styles pane and choose the name of the property. For rounded corners, you add the property Border-Radius. Dreamweaver CS5.5 and CS6 include pop-up dialogs, like the one shown here, to help you create the style rules for these popular CSS3 options.

Why can’t I see my fonts, transitions or other cool CSS3 effects in Dreamweaver?

One of my biggest frustrations with Dreamweaver CS6 (and version 5.5 for that matter) is that design view, which is supposed to show you what your web page will look like in a web browser, is woefully outdated. As a result, when your pages are displayed in design view, they look like they are displayed in a very old web browser, which means you won’t see any of your CSS3 style rules applied, and elements in your layout may not line up the way they will in the latest web browsers.

To get a better idea of what your page will look like in the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, and other browsers, you’ll need to click on the Live button at the top of the main workspace.

Unfortunately, many of Dreamweaver’s editing functions don’t work in Live View, so you’ll need to click the Live button again to go back to editing your page. With a little practice, you can get used to compensating for these design differences, but it does make Dreamweaver’s design view a less than ideal place to, well, design web pages.

And remember, to fully test what your web pages will look to your visitors, you must test your pages in at least the last few versions of all of the most popular web browsers. For that, Adobe’s BrowserLab, which you can use by choosing File > Preview in Browser > Adobe BrowserLab is a great tool because it enables you to preview your designs in a variety of web browsers before you publish them on the web.

About the Author

JANINE WARNER

Janine is an author, web designer, and the creator of the web design training site, DigitalFamily.com. She’s written more than 25 books about the Internet, including Web Sites DIY For Dummies, iPhone & iPad Web Design For Dummies, and every edition of Dreamweaver For Dummies. She’s also created more than 50 hours of training videos on Dreamweaver and CSS.

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With each update to Adobe Photoshop, tablet users enjoy a plethora of enhancements that make their workflow more productive and in some cases more enjoyable. Photoshop CS6 is no exception! What I am particularly interested in is what does this version bring to the tablet user? Again, CS6 does not disappoint. In my review of our favorite app, I have found a variety of features, both new and updated that will have tablet users cheering. Read on to learn, “What’s New in PS CS6 for Tablet Users”.

User Interface

Upon opening the app for the first time, your eyes will likely widen as you find the user interface (UI) has been updated to the fast-becoming standard, dark look. Adobe and other application developers have been gravitating toward darker UIs as studies have shown that gray values have less effect on your perception of tonal values and saturation. For some this new dark UI may be distracting at first, or present some contrast issues with text (especially in panels). If you’d prefer the “old” look, or would like to adjust the contrast, you can change the appearance in the Photoshop > Preferences > Interface.

What does the color of the UI have to do with tablet use? Nothing, but you can’t skip the cover of a book before you open it! I’m not judging. It’s just the first thing you see. Ok, let’s look at something more relevant in the UI that every tablet user should be aware of. If you skipped the upgrade to CS5, or perhaps did not notice the addition of two new buttons that appear on the options bar, you missed a big feature for tablet users. When you have the brush tool selected, these two icons enable pressure sensitive control of the size and/or opacity of a brush stroke. The buttons are available once again in CS6 but they come with a more descriptive tool tip that should make them easier to understand, and thus used more effectively.

In short, when toggling either (or both) of these buttons to their on, or depressed position, you elect to control the size or opacity of the brush by pen pressure. This method overrides whatever controls have been assigned to a brush preset, meaning when the button is in the off position, pressure is controlled in the Brush Panel. Tip: For general retouching, I often select a basic soft round brush from the brush panel, and then toggle the control of the size and opacity of the brush (tip) using these pressure control buttons.

Painting

Perhaps the biggest news for tablet users is the work that Adobe has put into the drawing and painting features. There have been updates to the Brush Panel, tools, tips, presets, performance and more!

I’ll start with perhaps the most visual enhancement, the introduction of “erodible tips” (as in tips that wear down) and “airbrush tips”. Found in the Brush Presets panel, erodible and airbrush tips can be identified by a profile view of a shaved pencil and a traditional airbrush respectively. The unique characteristics of the erodible tips include the combination of wear and texture as you continue to use them. The result is the appearance of what you would achieve when using traditional soft, dry media. The more you rub, for example a soft pastel pencil, onto a textured surface, the more it would wear down (and build up). Like traditional media, when you need to sharpen a tip you can do so in the Brush Tip Shape pane of the Brush Panel. (That’s a mouth full!)

Airbrush tips take on the characteristics of a traditional airbrush, most notably by incorporating the use of the tilt function found in Wacom’s professional pen tablets (Intuos and Cintiq). Angling the pen to the tablet when painting will “throw” or project the paint in the direction that you are pointing. A lighter amount of pressure simulates the effect of the airbrush being higher off the surface, while a heavier touch results in the effect that you would get if the airbrush were very close to the surface. (Opposite of what you might think or what you are used to with static brushes.) These two new brush tip types as well as a variety of new brush presets offer the artist, illustrator and painter some great new media options and styles to experiment with!

Something else that may grab your attention is an additional pane in the Brush Panel. “Brush Pose” enables you to set stylus parameters for Tilt (X and Y axis), Rotation and Pressure. Enabling these options override any pressure controls assigned in the brush preset. For example, users of an Intuos tablet or Cintiq interactive pen display, whose pen recognizes tilt, may opt to ignore tilt altogether or lock the angle of a brush while drawing. Additionally, users of Wacom’s optional Art Pen (which recognizes tilt, and rotation) can override the rotation of the pen. (For Bristle Tips, Erodible Tips and Airbrush Tips, you can see the effects applied in Brush Pose in the Live Tip Brush Preview. *Bristle Tips were introduced in Photoshop CS5.

Finally, a notable enhancement in the Brush Panel is the addition of a new option in the Color Dynamics pane. A checkbox now enables you to vary Color Dynamics on a per tip (or stroke) basis. When checked, Color Dynamics behaves as it has in the past. Random colors (between the foreground and background) are across the length of the stroke. Unchecking the box, maintains a constant color per stroke. Each subsequent stroke varies based on the settings in the pane. A nice addition for those looking to add variety to their illustration and design work.

HUD Brush Controls Update

On the subject of brush control, those that have enjoyed the dynamic HUD brush resize function will be thrilled to see it enhanced to offer what is being dubbed as “rich-cursor information”. When you modify the size (diameter) and hardness of a brush using the drag-resize method, in addition to the visual representation of the brush attributes, you now get a textual readout of the Diameter, Hardness and Opacity settings at the cursor.

Additionally, you can now elect to change the function of dragging up/down from its default (hardness) to opacity. To change from Hardness to Opacity, in the General Preferences, uncheck “Vary Round Brush Hardness based on HUD vertical movement.”

Tip: To visually adjust the size and hardness (or opacity) of a brush, use the following key commands when pressing your pen to the tablet and dragging.

Macintosh:

Change brush size: option-ctrl-drag left/right
Change brush hardness or opacity: option-ctrl-drag up/down

Windows:

Change brush size: alt-right mouse button drag left/right
Change brush hardness or opacity: shift-alt-right mouse button drag up/down

Tool Recording

I want to make mention of the new tool recording feature. This new function enables you to record brush strokes as part of an Action. My initial thoughts on this feature was, how cool would it be to record an action that makes a tonal adjustment to an image, and then brushes on a mask to reveal only a portion of the enhancement? When playing back the action, you can literally watch the mask appear. If it reveals (or conceals) too much of the effect, simply modify the mask after the fact. Or, how about playing back a sketch? You can now record each brush stroke laid down in the creation of a sketch for later playback!

To enable the recording of normally non-actionable tools, select the Allow Tool Recording menu option in the Actions Panel fly-out menu. A note on playing back actions that contain brush strokes: When playing an Action that contains brush strokes, keep in mind that the tool used in the original action is honored, however the settings for that particular tool (including brush presets) are not. The brush settings in effect during playback will be used. i.e. Size, color, opacity and more.

Camera Raw

With the recent introduction of Lightroom 4 you may have seen a preview of what was to come in the next version of Adobe Camera Raw (vr. 7.) –Lightroom and ACR use the same RAW processing engine. You can now make local adjustments to Temperature and Noise Reduction. Additionally, ACR 7 brings new Black/White as well as Highlight and Shadow controls to the basic panel; replacing/updating the previous Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks and Brightness controls.

Performance – Liquify and Oil Painting

Not all necessarily pen-centric, but welcome performance updates have been made for anyone who pushes pixels—literally! Many of the resource intensive functions found in previous versions of Photoshop have been updated to take advantage of later model computers, and more specifically, new video cards. These functions, now take advantage of the GPU. Non-technically speaking, they are faster. Meaning, you can actually use them effectively!

One such function that I look forward to using more often is Liquify. In the past Liquify was extremely resource intensive, lagging at the slightest wisp of the pen. Now, a little nip and tuck, here and there can be gracefully applied with the subtle nuance of pressure.

With this update on performance also comes a new filter, Oil Paint. Oil Paint offers photographers and artists a nice starting point when turning photos into paintings. The interface enables you to vary the level of stylization and cleanliness (smoothness) of the virtual brush being applied, as well as a variety of depth, detail and lighting effects. All based on a combination of sliders. Once you’ve created a base layer for your painting in the Oil Paint interface, you can make it your own by applying a personal touch with the bristle tips brushes (which mimic traditional media) introduced in CS5.

Kudos to John

To bring this What’s New review to a close, I would be remiss if I did not give kudos to the ever-brilliant John Derry who put in a significant amount of work into the development and use of the new erodible tips and airbrushes. His experience in art and technology have lent to a number of advancements in the evolution of creative applications. Specifically, those apps that combine the realistic look and feel of traditional media. The result of his efforts have given artists the ability to combine media that they never could traditionally, and at the same time, take advantage of all that digital media has to offer.

About the Author

Wes Maggio is a long-time tablet user and Senior Solutions Manager at Wacom Technology Services Corp. He is a passionate trainer and speaker, presenting at various photography and design events around the world. He is also a contributing writer to numerous creative magazines and he is the co-author of the leading title on tablet training; Wacom Tablets and Photoshop CS6 from PhotoshopCAFE. Wes is the host and frequent presenter of “Wacom Webinars”, a series of live webinars offered monthly, as well as the manager of the popular blog, Tablet Gurus, “the go-to place for tablet users”. In his spare time, if he is not on a plane somewhere, he is literally running around town.

Other Content

Lightroom 4 Learning site

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The post What’s new in Photoshop Cs6 for the Wacom tablet user appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.

A New Supercharged Engine – Again!

Once more Adobe couldn’t leave well enough alone (thankfully), and they’ve taken the brand new 2012 processing engine that powers the new Lightroom 4 and incorporated it into our beloved Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). This technological leap not only extends the capabilities of this invaluable image processing engine, but also dramatically increases the potential quality of the final results. Even though the way you work in the new ACR is significantly different in terms of how the sliders work in its foundational Basic panel, once you get used to it, you’ll find that it is completely indispensable for getting more than you ever thought possible out of your photographs!

Adobe achieved this quantum leap, especially as it relates to pulling out every drop of tonal detail in your image, by completely rewriting their raw “demosaicing” engine, just as they did in 2010. And fortunately, as in the past, ACR also processes JPEG’s and TIF’s beautifully. What you will be able to pull out in terms of tone, color and detail is going to astound you, but to access this new power you’re going to have to re-learn some of the ways you may have optimized your images in ACR in the past. And if you are new to working in ACR you’ll actually find version 7 is actually a lot more intuitive than previous versions. Let’s take a look at some of those differences.

Before and Afters of the power of the new Basic Panel’s possibilities. NO targeted dodging & burning was needed! ©BrookeChristl.com

A New Basic Way of Sculpting

Even though ACR 6 (the previous version) was incredibly powerful, the way the Basic panel (where the majority of your image enhancing takes place) was organized did not lead to the most intuitive way of working. Looking here on the far left are the default sliders and settings for ACR 6. The sliders already had default settings applied, and whether a slider lightened or darkened your image when moving it depended on the specific slider. And which portion of the tonal range was being adjusted by which slider (and how far the sliders could be “pushed” before artifacts were introduced) was a quandary for many.

ACR 6’s default sliders and settings. The new ACR 7’s options and VERY intuitive default 0’s. And the final settings for Brooke’s Trash The Dress photo above.

If you open an image in the new ACR 7 that you have previously worked on in an older version, you will find a little “exclamation” icon in the lower right-hand corner of the main image window that’s warning you that it’s using an older version of the processing engine (as mentioned, the last version was created in 2010). When this icon is visible you’ll notice that all the sliders within the Basic panel are the same as they were in ACR 6, and their order and how they work will be the same. As an aside, this is actually a feature, because if you have a particular effect that you liked to produce in previous versions of Adobe Camera Raw, you can still work that way even though those older sliders are technically no longer part of the ACR 7 processing engine. Additionally, if you use Presets that are based upon these older sliders, you can still use them as well because 7.0 allows for the older processing engine to co-exist within the software. That being said, you’re probably going to be updating and fine-tuning a lot of your favorite presets to take advantage of the new capabilities of the 2012 processor. Once you click on the Exclamation icon (it’s actually a button), or go over to the Camera Calibration tab and select the 2012 process, you’ll find that all the Basic sliders now default to zero smack dab in the middle of the slider bar, and all of them now work exactly the same way – meaning moving a slider to the left will always darken your image, moving it to the right will always lighten your image. But the magic behind each one of the sliders has actually changed significantly.

Let’s discuss what each slider in 7.0 does now.

Exposure

Exposure used to be much more of a highlight or white point slider within previous versions of ACR and could blow out or muddy-up your highlights if you weren’t careful. Now, Exposure is what you might typically think it is: it’s affecting the basic middle-tone brightness of your image, thus you can use it as the starting point for the manipulation of your images. You no longer need to worry if the highlights or shadows in your images seem compromised, they are still there and are happily waiting for your touch in the sliders below!

Contrast

In previous versions of ACR, you also had to be careful of the Contrast slider because of the possibility of clipping information in the shadows and highlights in your image. Contrast still primarily manipulates the middle-tones in a photograph, but you will find that it’s more forgiving than in the past, especially in the transition areas between the mid-tones and the highlights and shadows. But even with that forgiveness, for many images I recommend that you wait until later in your workflow process to adjust Contrast. In other words, use it once you’ve fine-tuned all your other options toadd that extra little bit of punch or to soften harsh tones.

Highlights and Shadows

You may suspect that the new Highlights and Shadows sliders are the same as the old Recovery and Fill Light sliders in the previous ACR, but nothing could be further from the truth. First, the Highlights and Shadow sliders are incredibly powerful in terms of what they’re able to resuscitate in an image! The tonal range, even in a single image, can now often be beautifully extended to produce what used to require three or more separate images to create in an HDR (High Dynamic Range) composite (a god-send in once-in-a-lifetime action situations such as Brooke Christl’s Trash the Dress image)! Second, you’ll also notice that because the sliders now begin in the center of the bar, not only can you bring back or darken Highlight detail, but you may also safely increase the neighboring Whites for punch as well! Same goes for working with the Shadows slider: you can brighten up a lot of information in the shadows but you can also take this three-quarter portion of the total range and bring it down, without plugging up your blacks, which is exciting! The Blacks and Whites sliders also operate on these same principals. In earlier ACR versions, even though you had a Black slider, you were only able to darken your darkest darks, you could never lighten the amount of base blacks like you can do now with ACR 7.

To over-simplify these controls, these six sliders can be thought of as neighboring pairs: Exposure and Contrast control your middle-tone areas. Highlights and Shadows control your three-quarter and quarter tones. The Whites and Blacks sliders fine-tune the furthest extremes of your photograph’s range. If you think of these as three associated adjustments pairs, I think you’ll find it easier to wrap your head around the new sliders.

But wait… there’s more…

Clarity: Power, but still with a caution

Even though the Clarity slider has the same name as in previous versions of ACR, it has been completely rewritten and now does a significantly better job of increasing apparent detail in an image without bringing in the “haloing” artifacts possible in previous versions. But because this edge contrast can be so significant, you might be lulled into a false sense of security and actually add too much contrast to these edges. Even though you won’t get the halos as you once did, you can still potentially plug up edge detail in certain images. So remember to zoom in and check your image when using excessive Clarity, you may find yourself adding a little bit more Shadow brightness, or a reduction in Contrast to compensate.

You can see in Brooke’s wedding dress shot that she significantly underexposed the image (wouldn’t you underexpose it if you only had ONE chance of getting THE shot of a bright shiny wedding dress and it’s inhabitant as they were about to meet Poseidon? ;). But even with this seeming lack of detail you will notice I was able to bring up the Exposure for the overall brightness of the image, then bring back in significant Highlight detail into the dress, once I had set the correct exposure. I was also able to pull out a huge amount of Shadow detail, taking it all the way up to 100% , without artifacts! I actually took the Whites UP in this file to add that satin sheen, yet maintain the Highlight detail! This is an amazing ability to fine-tune the entire tonal range of an image without the necessity of hand dodging & burning (we’ll get to Localized adjustments in a minute). Also, to bring in all the details in the water and dress the Clarity was set all the way up to 100%, without any artifact creation whatsoever, which would have been impossible in previous versions of ACR.

New Capabilities and Quality

Still not convinced? You say you could make shadows lighter and highlights darker in previous versions of ACR so what’s the big deal? The big deal is QUALITY! Take a look at this quick shot I took of a vintage motorcycle.

©Jack H. Davis / WowCreativeArts.com

In previous versions of ACR if you were to significantly darken the highlight information and bring up the shadow detail you could get significant artifacting at that transition between highlights and shadows, as in the fringing of the trees around the motorcycle seat. In the current ACR 7, there is no such artifacting and the detail throughout the image is crisper and cleaner than I would have ever imagined from a single shot!

A single shot “HDR”? Yup! And with the taming of the edge artifacts that used to happen where highlights and shadows collide, there is finally peace in the previously Dramatic Range!

Actually, this image is something I’ve used in the past to teach how to combine five bracketed shots together to create one HDR image. Using ACR 7 you can definitely pull off exposures that could have only been achieved with multi-shot High Dynamic Range combinations in the past – talk about a time-saver!

The Pen (OK… the Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter) is Mightier than the Sword!

If you were making a wish list for the Adobe Tooth Fairy (Russell Brown, are you listening?), and you had all these phenomenal capabilities added to the Basic panel, what would be the one additional characteristic that would make your creative darkroom dreams complete? Of course, you would want those capabilities added to ACR’s targeted Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter! And that’s exactly what Adobe has done with the improvements in ACR 7, and more!

Not only have they added our new best friends of Shadows, Highlight and Clarity, they have also given us something that we’ve never had before: the ability to adjust localized color temperature using a brush or gradient! Even though you could do something similar to this before by adding the opposite color cast using the little color swatch in the Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush panels, it’s not the same as actually using a temperature and tint slider to fine-tune and balance different color casts within an image. In this second Brooke Crystal wedding image we have a very warm interior artificial light balanced out with the cooler external sunlight by simply dragging out a Gradient Filter slider from the left to the right, with a tap toward the blue of the Temperature slider. And because Shadow resuscitation can now be put inside a brush or gradient as well, Adobe has also graciously added Noise Reduction to their localized adjustment tools, an incredibly useful feature when pulling out shadow detail that don’t want to come willingly!

A little cool temperature Graduated Filter balances out a challenging lighting situation in a snap! ©BrookeChristl.com

Curves Unleashed

Curves, one of the basic adjustments in Photoshop for the last hundred years, has been available in ACR for a while, with both Point Curves as well as the powerful Parametric Curves. But prior to ACR 7, we were unable to access the foundational Red, Green and Blue channels independently, but now you can. The benefit is that for the first time you can use separate Red, Green and Blue curves to fine-tune color casts and tonal information, but you can also use them for an immeasurable amount of special-effects enhancing to an image. Before ACR 7.0, this was really only possible in Photoshop. In this shot by Hal and Victoria Schmitt of LightWorkshops.com, we’re able to not only improve the tonal range of this portrait but also add a Cross Processing effect by shaping the total range of each one of the Red, Green and Blue channels independently of each other, allowing for a beautifully expressive enhancement, with absolute quality and control.

©Hal and Victoria Schmitt /LightWorkshops.com

Another long-time use for curves has been for converting images to black-and-white, one of the advanced features in Photoshop we’ve used for ages. Now with the combination of targeted Curves and the already phenomenal Hue, Saturation and Luminance panel, we have the ability to further fine tune black-and-white images in ways never before possible, such as in this portrait of this beautiful little girl also by Hal and Victoria Schmitt. Red hair goes white, red cloak goes black – with no dodging and burnng – figure THAT one out! 😉

Chromatic Aberrations Be Gone

Chromatic Aberrations are the annoying colorful edge artifacts seen in contrasting highlights left by the minor misalignment of different color channels in images taken with certain wide-angle lens (see the museum skylight shot). Chromatic Aberration removal was built into ACR before, but needed a special profile for the specific lens to do the job well. What the mad scientists at Adobe figured out was that they were able to do a better job of removing these edge color artifacts using their own algorithms rather than relying on the profiles. Specifically, using the Remove Chromatic Aberration option (within the Profile tab within the Lens Correction panel) in concert with the Defringe > Highlight Edges option (within the Manual tab of the same Lens Correction panel) allows you to virtually get rid of any sort of edge artifacting that you could possibly come across, all with a couple little clicks!

So there is a quick overview of just some of the improvements in the new Adobe Camera Raw 7. Now all the jaw-dropping and deadline-saving projects that you can DO with all that power, well, that would take an entire DVD to demonstrate (yes, that’s a shameless plug for my new Adobe Camera Raw 7 Enhancing and Lightroom 4 Enhancing titles from PhotoshopCafe.com and WowCreativeArts.com)!

About the Author

Jack Davis

Jack Davis is one of the world’s leading experts on Photoshop and Lightroom, as well as himself being an award-winning photographer. Jack is coauthor of a dozen different creative titles including the bestselling (a million copies+ in 12 languages) guide to Photoshop, The Photoshop Wow! Book, and How to Wow: Photoshop for Photography. For over 20 years Jack has been an internationally renowned spokesperson on digital imagery, and routinely teaching at conferences and workshops around the world. Davis is part of the “Dream Team” at the Photoshop World Conferences and was one of the first inductees into the Photoshop Hall of Fame for his lifetime contributions to the industry. Jack has an MA and MFA in Digital Imagery, and when he’s not in his studio in San Diego, he’s usually somewhere in Polynesia, iPhone and Big Boy camera in hand, capturing the local color.
For more about Jack, his training material and teaching schedule (including his immanent Workflow Tour with SandyPucTours.com) go to WowCreativeArts.com.

Adobe Camera Raw 7 Enhancing DVD
Jack Davis – Coming Soon!

With Photoshop CS6’s new ACR 7, Adobe has introduced tools that have the power to completely change the way we shape our photography. Instead of working one image at a time, one step at a time, now the vast majority of our photographic finishing can be done quickly, elegantly and nondestructively in one place! – without even opening Photoshop! This includes such universal tasks as dodging & burning, skin softening or even targeted white balancing and blurring! That’s what Adobe Camera Raw 7’s new processing engine and tools have brought with them to yield a dramatically streamlined workflow. You will have to see all these life-saving techniques in action to understand just how powerful they are, and how much easier they are gonna make you work! If you’re a Lightroom user Jack hasn’t left you out; there is a Lightroom 4 Enhancing title available from Jack soon as well. Also look for Jack’s Expressive Painting in Photoshop CS5/CS6 and Photoshop

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Repousse was the old title for the 3D engine in Photoshop. It has now been repurposed into 3D Extrusion in Photoshop CS6 Extended. We are going to explore a creative approach to creating a 3D scene exclusively in CS6. So let’s get started.
Workflow Overview

Step 1

Create a new file at 5×5 inches with a resolution of 200 PPI and type out text in all caps titled “PHOTOSHOP 3D”. When done go to the 3D menu and select “New 3D Extrusion from Selected Layer”.

Figure 1 -New 3D Extrusion from Selected Layer.

Step 2

Immediately you get an extruded 3D version of your text. Photoshop will ask you if you would like to switch to the 3D interface. I recommend that you chose to work in the 3D space as shown in figure 2. You can move, rotate or pan your 3D object by accessing the Move tool (V) and your options bar will show you various options for navigating the 3D object. You can toggle through these options (rotate, roll, drag, slide & scale) by using the Shift V on the keyboard.

Figure 2 – View of New 3D Extrusion in 3D workspace.

Step 3

You will see a small 3D widget that will allow you to move in the X,Y,Z axis where each axis is designated with a red (X), green (Y) and blue (Z) colors. Each is joined to a yellow cube, which designates the resize function for 3D objects. However, you can enlarge this widget to assist you in your workflow by holding down the Shift key on the keyboard then click and drag on the cube upward to enlarge the widget itself. You can also drag downward to reduce the size of the widget.

Figure 3 – Enlarge 3D Widget.

Step 4

Take note that you will be working quite a bit in two panels which are the 3D & Properties panels. In the 3D panel you have the ability to access your Environment, Scenes, Cameras and any 3D object. Select the “PHOTOSHOP 3D” object and take note that the options for that object are shown in the Properties Panel. By default the Mesh button is selected on the top left corner. Select the “Extrusion Depth” slider to get a feel for extending the length of the text as shown in figure 3.

Figure 4 – Extrude text

Step 5

Now select the Deform button to the right of the Mesh and practice tapering the text extrusion. You can use the sliders to achieve this or click & drag on the widget symbols to twist, taper or extrude. For now taper the text and use the “Deformation Axis” to set the directions. Use figures 5,6 & 7 as guides.

Figure 5 – Taper towards the center

Figure 6 – Taper towards the right.

Figure 7 – Taper towards the left

Step 6

Next, apply Twist to the extruded text and notice how fast and easy Photoshop CS6 executes this command. Once done experimenting set the text back to a standard extrusion and let’s moves on to beveling the text.

Figure 8 – Twist to the extruded text.

Applying Bevel to the Extruded Object

Now that you have a feel on how to quickly extrude and modify text into a 3D shape, lets learn how to apply a bevel to its surface.

Step 1

Select the Cap button to the right of the Distort button in the Properties Panel. Near the bottom of the Properties panel, target Angle and Strength to get a bevel similar to what you see in figure 9.

Figure 9 – Apply Bevel to text.

Step 2

Click on the Contour drop menu and you will see various options for creating a beveled edge effect. You can explore these as well as make some of you own.

Figure 10 – Explore bevel styles.

Step 3

Near the bottom of the Properties panel you will see the Angle & Strength for the front inflation. This will balloon the face of the text outward or inward. The Angle controls the contour of the surface and the strength controls how far the surface will inflate or deflate as shown in figure 11 & 12. Finally, apply a simple rounded edge bevel and let’s move on to texturing our 3D objects.

Figure 11 – Explore Inflation.

Figure 12 – Explore Deflation.
Note: I have always found that changing the color designation for any of the selected 3D objects helped me in quickly finding my way around the 3D interface. Figure 13 shows some of my settings for visuals in the 3D space.

Figure 13 – 3D color preferences.

Texturing

Now that we have our objects they will not come to life until we apply an interesting surface to them. This is where we will explore how easy it is to apply preset or custom textures to our object.

Step 1

In the 3D panel select the “PHOTOSHOP3D inflation material”. Note that all of your options for its surface show up in the Properties panel.

Figure 14 – View of the Materials panel for the inflation surface

Step 2

In the 3D Properties panel select texture preset submenu and apply any preset that you like. Don’t worry about which one because we will change it later. Just practice on applying various textures.

Figure 15 – Apply a preset to the Front Inflation.

Step 3

If you end up with a bunch of surfaces and you plan to have the same surface for each one there is an easy way to copy and paste the same texture on all surfaces. Access the 3D Materials Eyedropper Tool on your tool panel.

Figure 16 – Access the 3D Materials Eyedropper Tool.

Step 4

Physically place the eyedropper the front face of the font and click to sample that texture.

Figure 17 – Sample the texture on the text.

Step 5

Next, hold down the Alt/Opt key on your keyboard then click on the bevel of the text to apply the sampled texture to its surface. It’s that easy. Let’s talk about lighting next.

Figure 18 – Apply the Sampled texture to the text bevel.

Lighting

Lighting in Photoshop CS6 Extended is a lot of fun. It’s fast and responsive with convincing results.

Step 1

On the right of the 3D Panel click the light button and target the Infinite Light1. You should see a 3D representation of the light source in Photoshop. In addition you will see a shadow on the ground plane representing the direction & angle of the light source. Take note that you can change the light angle by a Shift Click & drag the shadow on the ground plane.

Figure 19 – Target the Infinite Light1.

Step 2

To help us see how the shadow is affected by the light, let’s quickly set the shadow on the ground (3D>Snap Object to ground Plane). Note that the main 3D object folder must be selected in the 3D panel for this option to be active as shown in figure 21. You can change the direction of the light.

Figure 20 – object above the ground plane.

Figure 21 –3D object snapped to the ground plane.

Step 3

You can make additional edits to your objects that are new in CS6. Target the internal Constraints for the “P” key located inside 3D panel as shown in figure 22. This is the constraint that makes the hole inside of the “P” object. Next, focus on the Properties panel and you will see the “Delete Constraint” button. Click it to see the effects of deleting the targeted constraint. You should something like what is shown in figure 23. However, you can create your own custom constraints via selections. For now, just draw a select in front of “P” key using the Lasso tool and in the Properties panel select “Hole” from the submenu for Type and watch Photoshop accurately create a new constraint. Use figure 24 as a guide.

Figure 22 -Target the “Delete Constraint” button.

Figure 23 – Results of creating a new Constraint.

Figure 24 –Create the Constraint.

Step 4

That’s not all you can do with text. You can edit it as well while it’s in 3D mode. Lets’ try it. Just right click over the text and you will get quick access to the Properties panel and click the “Edit Source” button on bottom of the panel (Figure 25).

Figure 25 – Click the “Edit Source”

Step 5

Change the text to “PS CS6 3D” as shown in figures 26 & 27. Pretty cool … huh?

Figure 26 – Click the “Edit Source” button.

Figure 27 – Resource of editing the text.

Creating 3D from Painted Shapes

We are going to create a cliff for our text to sit on. We will do it using one of the square brushes in the Brush menu then extrude it into a 3D object.

Step 1

Use one of the square brushed of your choice to paint a shape with black on a new layer as shown in figure 28.

Figure 28 – Create painted shape on a new layer.

Step 2

Extrude the shape into a 3D object.

Figure 29 – Extrude the shape into a 3D object.

Note: Take note that you can see more than one camera view at a time. Click on the submenu for the additional camera view and select any view of your choice as shown in figure 30.

Figure 30 – Select additional camera view.
You switch the view to the main document by clicking the Swap Main & Secondary View button as shown in figure 31.

Figure 31 – Swap Main & Secondary View.

Step 3

Let’s apply some texture on the cliff using a photo. Select the extrusion material for the cliff.

Figure 32 – Select the extrusion material for the cliff.

Step 4

Now apply the texture on the cliff using a photo. Select the extrusion material for the cliff by clicking the submenu for the Diffuse button in the Properties panel. Click on Replace Texture and use the “texture-001.jpg”. You should see something like figure 33.

Figure 33 – Apply “texture-001.jpg” to the cliff’s extrusion.

Step 5

Let’s give the cliff some texture as well. So target the bump in the same panel and load a new texture with “texture-001 bump.jpg”. Increase the bump strength to your liking until you should see something like figure 34.

Figure 34 – Apply “texture-001.jpg” to the cliff’s extrusion.
Merge 3D Objects

So far the 3D objects are on separate layer so to get them to interact within the same scene we have to merge them. Let’s go do it.

Step 1

Select both 3D layers then merge them as a single 3D object (3D>Merge 3D Layers). Figures 35 & 36 show the before and after.

Figure 35 – Select 3D layers (before).

Figure 36 –After

Step 2

Apply “texutue-003.jpg” to the front, bevel and extrusion of the 3D text. Adjust the light so that it is emitting from the extreme right corner at approximately 45 degrees of the text.

Figure 37 – Apply texture and change lighting.

Step 3

Apply “texutue-003.jpg” to the front, bevel and extrusion of the 3D text. Adjust the light so that it is emitting from the extreme right corner at approximately 45 degrees of the text. Next, apply depth of field so that the focus favors the foreground then falls off toward the rear. Adjusts Distance and Depth until you get close to figure 37.

Figure 38 – Select the extrusion material for the cliff.

With some additional texturing to the cliff figure 39 was achieved.

Figure 39 – Final View.

Conclusion

I hope that enjoyed this article and that it has helped to spur your imagination as to what is possible with 3D in Photoshop CS6 extended. Experiment much and practice often to come up with your own discoveries.

About the Author

Stephen Burns (www.chromeallusion.com) has discovered the same passion for the digital medium as he has for photography as an art form. His background began as a photographer 28 year ago and in time, progressed toward the digital medium. His influences include the great Abstractionists & the Surrealists including Jackson Pollock, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, and Lenore Fini, to name a few.
Stephen Burns has been a corporate instructor and lecturer in the application of digital art and design for the past 12 years. He has been exhibiting digital fine art internationally at galleries such as Durban Art Museum in South Africa, Citizens Gallery in Yokahama, Japan, and CECUT Museum Of Mexico to name a few. Part of his exhibiting won him 1st place in the prestigious Seybold International digital arts contest
Digital Involvement
He teaches Digital Manipulation Workshops Internationally as well as in his home town San Diego. He is an instructor on www.xtrain.com, Photoshop Café (photoshopcafe.com and a guest contributor to the Kelby Group. You will often see him as an instructor at Siggraph (www.Siggraph.org) leading the Digital Artistry Workshops.

CS6 Superguide

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Out of the gate, you will notice the newly designed user interface. Things have been rearranged to give more importance to your footage. The interface chrome has been reduced and finessed to get it out of the way and free up space for more important things. The buttons are new and the panels are more customizable than before, giving you the freedom to set up things the way you like to work.

The way the windows are arranged are a little different too. Gone is the media browser on the left side. It’s now replaced by nice large thumbnails at the bottom of the screen. These show previews of your footage. You can hover scrub, which means, as you move your pointer over the thumbnails the footage will scrub through. You can even set and out trim points in the thumbnails. If you don’t like all this newness, you have the flexibility to choose the CS 5.5 layout. Thought went into the layout, when you open an earlier project, it opens in the earlier workspace.

Keyboard shortcuts are also changed to more closely mimic the ones in final cut pro. Once again you can change them in the preferences if you so choose.

Performance

All of this cosmetic enhancement would be called “all show and no go”, if something hadn’t happened in the performance area. What has been dubbed the mercury playback engine has received a turbo charge with native support for open CL and further GPU optimization. All this amounts to a much snappier and speedier response while working in premiere pro CS6. It now supports resolutions up to 5k. Also worth noting, playback now continues when adjustments are being made to filters.

Audio

Audio has received some attention, with the addition of better and larger meters and also some love in the audio panel

With the selection active, switch to Refine Edge, you can see it in the Options bar. You will see lots of new options. While refining selections, you will work in the top part of the panel. Notice there is a pull down menu with lots of viewing options.
Here is a little tip to simplify the process. Click on Show Radius. You will notice (as you slide the radius slider in Edge Detection) an edge appears. This is the edge where Photoshop decides what to keep and what to erase.

3 Way Color Corrector

The 3 way now acts the way you would expect it to. The way it works is now similar to Final Cut Pro.

Adjustment Layers

One of my personal favorite features is the addition of adjustment layers. These work just like the non destructive adjustment layers in Photoshop. Through down an adjustment layer and all kinds of corrections such as color corrector, luma curves etc are all sitting on a layer which overlays all the footage. Ah, this is so nice and makes life so easy. No longer do you have to create a ton of presets and keep copying and pasting them.

Warp Stabilize

One of my favorite features added in After Effects CS5.5 is the Warp Stabilize. This tool allows you to take shaky footage and smoothen out the movement. It analyzes the movement and either crops or uses content aware technology to fill in the edges. This can make a shaky movement almost look like it was shot on a dolly or tripod. Perfect for HDSLR footage. Why do I bring up an After Effects feature? Because it’s now built natively into Premiere Pro CS6. This makes it so quick and easy to stabilize shots without having to use dynamic link, or render out After Effects comps.

Multi Cam

Multi camera editing has now been increased beyond 4 cameras and now supports as many cameras as your hardware can handle.

About the Author

Colin Smith is a best-selling author, trainer, and award-winning new-media designer who has caused a stir in the design community with his stunning photorealistic illustrations composed entirely in Photoshop. Colin is also known as a pioneer of HDR photography. He is founder of the world’s most popular Photoshop resource site, PhotoshopCAFE.com, which boasts over 20 million visitors.

With over 14 years of experience in the creative industry, Colin was formerly Senior Editor and Creative Director for VOICE magazine. He is a regular columnist for Photoshop User magazine. He has been featured in most major imaging magazines including, Computer Arts, Macworld, After Capture, PSD Photoshop, Advanced Photoshop, Photoshop Creative, Digital Photographer, Web Designer magazine and a host of others..

Colin’s graphic design work has been recognized with numerous awards, including, MacWorld Digital Design and 3 Guru awards at Photoshop World 2001 and 2002, for his work in both Illustration and Web Design. He’s authored or coauthored more than eighteen books on Photoshop, including the best-selling How to Do Everything with Photoshop CS and CS2 (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2005) and award-winning Photoshop Most Wanted: Effects and Design Tips (A Press/Friends Of Ed, 2002). Colin is also creator of the Photoshop Secrets Video training series (PhotoshopCD.com). He is in high demand across the USA, presenting his Photoshop techniques to Photographers and graphics professionals across the nation. He has been a speaker at such conferences as Flash Forward, NVision, Photoshop World, PIDE, WPPI, PIDE, DL Expo, Creative Suite Conference, Cre8, Create Chaos, Deviant Art Summit and many more. In 2008 Colin was the featured speaker for a Sold out Multi-City Tour (Flash Summer Camp) Sponsored by Adobe and Lynda.com. Colin has consulted such companies as Adobe Systems, Edison International, Apple and Disney Studios.

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Time stoppeth for no man… or InDesign user, apparently, as Adobe today rolls out their announcement of InDesign CS6. Everyone knew CS6 was coming (Adobe said it would be released the first half of this year), and we at InDesignSecrets have all been using beta versions for a while — but until today we haven’t been able to discuss the features publicly. Now, let the floodgates open!

There are many features in InDesign CS6 to get excited about: the phenomenal ability create PDF form fields; the almost magical way you can set up objects on your page to move around when the page size changes; the option to export grayscale PDF files. There are also features that will make you scratch your head until you get used to them. For example, the Content Conveyor tools require some work to understand, but we’re convinced that some users will find this one of the most valuable features in the program.

All in all, there are dozens of new features in CS6. Until it is officially released we can’t really “review” the program as a whole, but what we can do is give you a good overview of what to expect and what you’ll want to pay attention to when CS6 shows up on your doorstep.

By the way, one of the biggest changes in CS6 is the availability of the Adobe Creative Cloud, which among other things, allows you to get access to all Adobe Creative Suite applications for a relatively modest monthly fee. We’ll be covering that in more detail in a later post.

Creating Interactive Forms

PDF forms fields (checkboxes, text entry fields, and so on) have been a long requested feature and have finally been added to InDesign CS6. The easiest way to try out the new form fields is to switch to the Interactive for PDF workspace. While you are in this workspace, there is a new library panel available under the window menu called “Sample Buttons and Forms”.

After dragging out these sample form fields into your layout you can edit them with the Buttons and Froms panel (formerly the Button Panel). From here you can modify their attributes like their description, font size, read only and more. If you prefer to create form fields from scratch you can convert any InDesign object into a text field, check box, combo box, radio button, or signature field. If you would like to test your form you will need to export your layout to an interactive PDF since the preview panel has been renamed to the more accurate SWF preview panel.

One could argue that PDF Forms are in CS6 mainly due to Tony Harmer’s ignite session at last years PepCon where he beautifully crafted a poem pleading with Adobe to add PDF forms. This just goes to show that if you really want a feature added to InDesign, pleading your case to the InDesign Team (preferably in iambic pentameter) is. — fritz

Alternate Layouts

There are several new features in CS6 that are intended to take same of the drudgery out of repurposing content for different page sizes or for output to a variety of devices with different screen sizes, resolutions, and aspect ratios.

The new Alternate Layout feature helps you create two or more layouts in a single InDesign file. For example, you could have a facing pages layout for a 6×9 inch book, a 5×5 inch book, and a 7×8 inch book all in a single InDesign file. One advantage of having the layouts in a single file is that you can use three other new features (Liquid Layout, Linked Objects, and the Content Collector/Content Placer) to help keep your content current in all your versions. — KG

Liquid Layout

Liquid Layout is intended to help reduce the amount of work it takes to reformat pages, or portions of pages, for different sizes and aspect ratios. (See this post for a sneak peak Adobe presented last October.) It’s ideal for quickly adapting layouts between multiple sizes of tablet screens, or creating a series of ads at different sizes, or even for reformatting a book into a different trim size. There is some configuration and setup involved, so it is particularly beneficial for template-driven, repetitive workflows.

To use liquid layout, you apply one of five different “rules” to page items that specify how these objects should react (move or resize) when you change the page dimensions. You test these rules by temporarily tugging on the page edges with the Page tool. Once you have the rules established, then you either permanently change the page size with the Page tool and the Control bar, or create an Alternate Layout with a new page size, telling InDesign to apply your liquid layout rules as the alternate layout is created. — KG

Linked Content

Liquid Layout is intended to help reduce the amount of work it takes to reformat pages, or portions of pages, for different sizes and aspect ratios. (See this post for a sneak peak Adobe presented last October.) It’s ideal for quickly adapting layouts between multiple sizes of tablet screens, or creating a series of ads at different sizes, or even for reformatting a book into a different trim size. There is some configuration and setup involved, so it is particularly beneficial for template-driven, repetitive workflows.

To use liquid layout, you apply one of five different “rules” to page items that specify how these objects should react (move or resize) when you change the page dimensions. You test these rules by temporarily tugging on the page edges with the Page tool. Once you have the rules established, then you either permanently change the page size with the Page tool and the Control bar, or create an Alternate Layout with a new page size, telling InDesign to apply your liquid layout rules as the alternate layout is created. — KG

Content Collector/Content Placer Tools

Continuing with the theme of making it easier to reuse content, the new Content Collector and Content Placer tools aim to make it easier to quickly copy content between page, alternate layouts, or documents.

When you choose either of these tools, a new interface element called the Content Conveyor appears on the screen.

At its simplest, these tools and the conveyor behave like copy and paste, but you get an unlimited number of “clipboards”. In other words, you can “collect” a dozen different objects from one location, and then “place” them one by one in another location. The way that the tools and the conveyor work together makes it very quick and efficient to collect and place lots of different page objects. — KG

On-object Link Status and Control

Since linked content is a lot more important in CS6, the application gives you a more obvious way to tell when a story or an object is out-of-date. By default, a linked story or object shows an on-object Link Badge. (If you don’t want to see it, turn it off in View > Extras > Show/Hide Link Badge.)

If the story or object becomes out-of-date because its parent has changed its text or appearance, you’ll see a warning triangle. Double-clicking will update the link. Option/Alt-clicking takes you to the Links panel. —Steve

Primary Text Frame

You can designate a text frame on the master page as the Primary Text Frame. (This replaces the Master Text Frame from earlier versions which never really worked the way you wanted to.)

When you apply a different master page to your layout page, the story in the Primary Text Frame flows into the Primary Text Frame, following its shape and location from the new master page. And you no longer need to override a Primary Text Frame before adding text. This will eliminate a constant source of confusion for newcomers. —Steve

Text Frames that Auto-Size

The end to text frame oversets? Debuting as a new tab in the Text Frame Options dialog box, the Auto-Size controls lets you set a text frame to automatically resize itself based on the amount of text it has, dynamically moving frame edges to fit as you edit the contents. You can specify that the auto-sizing is restricted to Height Only, Width Only, or both; choose which side(s) are allowed to move and which should stay locked down, and set a minimum height and width. Auto-Size settings can be included in an Object Style, too. Think of all those sidebars, captions, and pull-quotes that you never have to worry about oversetting or manually closing up empty space as you edit the text! Very easy to get spoiled by this one. —AMC

Flexible Columns

It’s a fact that long lines of text are more difficult to read than shorter ones. This is most evident in newspapers. While InDesign has long had the ability to set number of columns and the widths of those columns in a text frame, changing those attributes meant manually opening the Text Frame Options dialog box and setting those numbers.

Wouldn’t it be great if, as you changed the size of the frame, the widths of the columns adjusted? Now they can. Just set the default width for a column and should you need to adjust the width of the frame the column widths will adjust accordingly. This ties in nicely to alternate and liquid layouts where you could have a portrait and landscape orientation in one file. — Bob

In previous versions of ACR if you were to significantly darken the highlight information and bring up the shadow detail you could get significant artifacting at that transition between highlights and shadows, as in the fringing of the trees around the motorcycle seat. In the current ACR 7, there is no such artifacting and the detail throughout the image is crisper and cleaner than I would have ever imagined from a single shot!

Improved EPUB 2 Export, new EPUB 3 Export

A new dropdown menu in the EPUB Export Options dialog box gives you a choice of export formats: EPUB 2.01, EPUB 3, and an enticingly-named ”EPUB 3 with Layout.”

First let’s get that EPUB 3.0 with Layout one out of the way: As with a few other new commands in InDesign CS6, this option is more of a promise than a working feature. Choosing it results in a warning that it’s an “experimental” format they’re working on, aimed toward “adaptation of layouts across different mobile devices,” (so the “layout” in the name does not mean a fixed-layout EPUB), and currently only “specific Adobe viewer technologies” will work with this format, but these viewers are not named and aren’t available (yet). In other words, move on, nothing to see here folks, but we’ll let you know.

New features in EPUB 2.01 (and EPUB 3.0) are more gratifying. First, there’s the existence of the EPUB 3.0 option itself. When you choose it, you’re able to do EPUB 3-only things like create an EPUB with vertical Japanese text and placed HTML and Adobe Edge animations (which use HTML5 and CSS3), and include links to one or more external Javascript files. Exporting a document to EPUB 3.0 results in a valid EPUB 3.0 eBook, including the requisite new TOC.xhtml file and a fall-back TOC.ncx file for EPUB 2.x reading engines. Now all we need is an EPUB reader or device that understands EPUB 3, and we’re all set.

Adobe has added new features and improved the mark-up for EPUB projects in general. You now have much more flexibility when splitting a layout into multiple XHTML files in the EPUB because you can tag one or more paragraph styles to Split Document whenever you export it to EPUB. Tables retain their cell styles (they get converted to CSS) along with column width and minimum row height information. Anchored and inline text frames now retain settings like fill color, border style and width, padding (text insets) and margins for text wrap. You can link to multiple custom CSS files instead of just one. —AMC

Grayscale Preview and Grayscale PDF Export

You can preview a color file in Grayscale on the screen, and then export to a grayscale PDF right from InDesign. It’s pretty simple, but it’s something that many users have been asking for for a decade. — KG

Align to Key Object

This control, which has previously only been in Illustrator, now makes its debut in InDesign. It allows you to choose which object in your selection you want your other objects to align with. To tell InDesign which object in a multiple selection is the key object, just click it. Its selection border gets an extra hit of pixels, making it easy to spot in a crowd. — KG

The Little Things

User Interface tweaks: INDESIGN HAS STOPPED YELLING AT US ALL BY DEFAULT. Whew! Panel names and workspaces are now displayed in Title Case instead of ALLCAPS. Also, there are more subtle tweaks: You can collapse panels back into the dock by clicking on their names, just like we used to do in CS4. Also, panels have a gripper bar at the bottom for resizing, close buttons are now xs instead of circles, and anchored object controls now match the layer of the frame they’re attached to. —Mike

Placeholder text language options: When you select the Type > Fill with Placeholder Text, hold Command/Ctrl to select from a list of nine languages for the placeholder text, including Roman, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. But sadly, no bacon ipsum, Elvish, or Klingon yet. –Mike

Split Window: The Split Window icon, located in the far bottom right of each document window does one simple thing—it splits the window into two separate views. This provides a quick, straightforward way to see two different views of your layout at once. You can zoom in on the page in one view, and see the entire page in the other view. Or, you can work on a master page in one view and see page six in the second view. Or, view your horizontal-orientation tablet layout in one view, and the vertical-orientation alternate layout in the other view. — KG

Complex Calculations in Dialog Boxes and Panels: You can now enter something like 45/6*79 and InDesign will calculate the correct answer. –Mike

Digital Publishing workspace: The “Interactive” workspace has been updated to “Digital Publishing,” which includes the Liquid Layout panel and the DPS Folio Builder panel. You will still need to download the latest DPS tools separately; once you do, then this workspace will also contain the Folio Producer panel. –Mike

Export to PNG (with transparency): You can export a selection, a page range, or a document to PNG. –Mike

Extension Manager Sets: You can create and manage sets of extensions through the CS6 Extension Manager just like the old feature of plug-in sets. —Mike

Hunspell Dictionary default: For most languages, the Hunspell open source dictionaries are now the default dictionaries for spelling and hyphenation. These are the same dictionaries used by Mac OS X, OpenOffice, and browsers like Chrome and Firefox. —Mike

Accurate screen sizing: Break out your old pica rulers and hold them up to the screen. InDesign CS6 does a much better job of matching on screen sizes to real life. —Mike

Keeps with Spans and Splits: Simply put, the keeps functions for paragraphs (Keep with Next, Keep lines together, etc.) now work on paragraphs that are set to span columns or split. Even though we’re classifying it under “little things,” we’ve been informed that getting this to work was actually quite the programming challenge, involving hundreds of hours. Huzzahs to the software engineers! —Mike

Recent Fonts List: You can now display a list of up to 50 recently-used fonts in the Control, Character, and Glyphs panels, and at the top of the installed fonts list in the Type > Font menu. —Mike

Save as IDML: While the process of downsaving via IDML hasn’t changed, the folks at Adobe have tried to take some of the mystery out of process by adding IDML to the options in the Save As dialog box, and including a message about how the downsaving process works. —Mike

PANTONE PLUS SERIES color swatch libraries: The PANTONE libraries included with InDesign have been updated with the new PANTONE PLUS SERIES colors. – KG

Name Ranges in XLSX files: A bug prevented named ranges in Excel 2007 and later from displaying in the place dialog. The only way to place named ranges was to save it back to XLS. This bug has been fixed in CS6.-Bob

Export to Interactive As Pages: InDesign CS5 and 5.5 insisted that when you choose File > Export > PDF (Interactive), you would always export spreads. You can now choose between exporting pages or spreads. The default is spreads. —Steve

Package files includes overlay assets: With CS5 and CS5.5 anything used only in an overlay such as an HTML page or an audio controller image was ignored in the package process. CS6 creates an Overlay Assets folder for these objects. –Bob

For More Information

Of course, this short article only scratches the surface of each of these features. If you want to go deeper, check out:

Issue 47 of InDesign Magazine. This not only has a great roundup of CS6 features by Mike Rankin, but also includes great InDepth features about Alternate Layouts and Liquid Layout by Claudia McCue and Pariah Burke. Subscribers will get this issue immediately; it sometimes takes a handful of days to get it available for non-subscribers.

Adobe TV has a ton of movies ready to play on all the CS6 products. [Sorry, public link to come ASAP.]

And, of course, we’ll be covering CS6 for months to come at InDesignSecrets. Be sure to check back periodically for the newest info. Of course, we won’t forget about users of CS5 and earlier… we know that not everyone can upgrade right away.

About the Author(s)

Anne-Marie Concepcion, David Blatner, Bob Levine, Keith Gilbert, James Fritz, Mike Rankin and Steve Werner

CS6 Superguide

All the CS6 information and more is available as a PDF magazine called the CS6 Superguide. If you’re on our list, you will receive it free by email as soon as it’s available. If not, sign up now and get the CS6 Superguide for free.

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