Adobe Photoshop CS5 review

At a time when most creative software seems to be stuck in a rut, Photoshop CS5 comes as a bit of a surprise. It’s packed with startlingly impressive new features, some of which herald a significant leap for the sophistication of image-editing software. Considering that Photoshop CS4 was already so mature, elegant and stacked to the rafters with powerful features, this update exceeds our highest expectations.

Before we get too carried away, let’s take a look at the more down-to-Earth improvements. Photoshop is now available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions; we measured a performance boost of up to 40 per cent when comparing the two versions on a Windows 7 64-bit PC with 8GB RAM, although some tests only showed a six per cent increase.

RAW processing benefits from more sophisticated noise reduction. Lens correction includes automatic correction of distortions, chromatic aberrations and vignetting, all calculated by referencing photos’ EXIF data against profiles for various SLR lenses. The profile database is currently pretty small but that should improve with time. A new Mixer Brush delivers an interesting hybrid between painting and smudging, and works well with the new Bristle Tips, which emulate a variety of natural paintbrush shapes.

The most impressive new feature is Content-Aware Fill, which crops up as an innocuous looking button in the Spot Healing Brush’s options. This brush was already invaluable for removing dust spots, bits of rubbish and skin blemishes, pasting the texture from a nearby area and colour-matching it to its new surroundings.

However, it struggled when the offending item was large or spanned two distinct background textures. Now, selecting the Content-Aware button makes more intelligent decisions about what to fill the space with. It wasn’t smart enough to preserve structured geometric shapes and patterns, but in most cases it produced photo-realistic results that previously required lengthy manual cloning techniques.

Content-Aware Fill can also be invoked by selecting an area of the background layer and hitting Delete. Rather replacing the selected area with a block colour, the software fills it in by cloning from various other parts of the image. Its effectiveness is highly dependent on the material being edited – it nearly always messed up with man-made objects, for example, although it had a reasonable stab at extrapolating straight lines. For natural environments, the results were often astonishingly effective.