What's New in Photoshop CS5 - The Complete Video Set

Please join me for the next ten days as we explore Photoshop CS5’s most interesting and useful new features. Each day, we’ll examine one of CS5’s remarkable additions.

If you’re too excited to wait ten days (or if you’d like to support this site), click here to download the entire ten tutorial series for $9.95. For the next two Thursdays, these CS5 videos will replace the Photoshop Workbench, but don’t worry, the Workbench will return to its regular spot on Thursday, May 27.

Here’s a schedule of upcoming tutorials:

Thursday, May 13 – Content-Aware Fill and Heal – 9:52
Learn secrets for retouching with Content-Aware Fill and Content-Aware Spot Healing.

Friday, May 14 – Refine Edge Refinements – 12:39
Discover how to use the Refine Edge (Refine Mask) dialog in a compositing workflow, while exploring the dialog’s new Edge Detection, Smart Radius, Refine Radius, Erase Refinements, Decontaminate Colors, and Output To features.

Saturday, May 15 – Tools Enhancements – 9:45
Take a journey into CS5’s tools enhancements, including a Crop tool Rule of Thirds overlay, a straightforward Straighten button, a scrubby Zoom tool, a Neutral Density Gradient preset, and several others.

Sunday, May 16 – Camera Raw Improvements – 8:02
Take a look at Adobe Camera Raw 6.0’s new features, including 2010 Processing, vastly improved Noise Reduction, Add Grain, and two significantly improved styles of Post Crop Vignetting.

Monday, May 17 – Automated Lens Correction – 7:08
Learn how to use the Lens Correction Auto Correction panel to search by lens criteria and automatically remove geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting.

Tuesday, May 18 – Layers Enhancements – 6:57
Take a peek at several new and improved layers features, including Paste in Place, drag-and-drop smart object layering, Layer Styles defaults, and many others.

Wednesday, May 19 – Puppet Warp – 6:16
Discover secrets for realistically warping parts of a subject using Puppet Warp’s remarkable (almost sci-fi) features.

Thursday, May 20 – A Giant Leap for HDR – 16:38
Take a look at the revamped Merge to HDR Pro feature and the new single image HDR Toning dialog, including HDR presets, ghost removal, and a powerful new slider-based interface.

Friday, May 21 – Bridge Enhancements – 14:28
Explore improvements to the Batch Rename dialog and learn how to watermark in the Output module.

Saturday, May 22 – Painting on a Photograph with the Mixer Brush – 14:30
Learn secrets for using CS5’s Mixer and Bristle brushes to realistically blend paints with colors in a photograph.

In other noteworthy news, I’ve decided not to write a Photographer’s Photoshop CS5 Companion eBook. Instead, I’m pouring my energy into two other exciting projects.

In addition to releasing the “What’s New in CS5″ videos, I’m making wonderful progress on an eBook about the spectacular world of HDR. It will feature both Photomatix and Photoshop tutorials, as well as useful workflow information that is absent in many other HDR books. The eBook will also include an image showcase packed with evocative images designed to inspire ideas for your own work. I’m hoping to release the HDR eBook this summer.

My other project is a complete departure from anything I’ve ever done. If you have children (or a child inside), they’ll be intrigued by my upcoming children’s book about a boy who dreams of flying. I’m co-writing and co-illustrating the book which features camera-based illustrations that employ HDR and several other creative techniques never seen before in children’s books.

Thanks for all of your support and encouragement!

Mark

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Image for Photoshop Workbench 238: Blending a Soft Edge with a Background

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Dennis Heckman was a participant in my recent Botanical Dreaming workshop in Boulder, CO. During a live Photoshop evaluation, Dennis inquired about the best way to replace the hazy upper left corner of this calla lily image with a more attractive blue to black gradient. Since this is a shallow focus f/2.8 portrait, we needed to devise a plan that would allow us to blend the new background with the flower’s soft edge. Here’s what we came up with.

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Image for Photoshop Workbench 237: Fusing the Old and New

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I recently came across a wonderful Dave Cross tutorial that illustrated how to fuse an old photo with a new one. Dave’s tutorial idea was inspired by a visit to a site called Abduzeedo.com. On the site, there are images of people holding old photos in front of the locations where they were originally captured many years before. The result is a fascinating “then-and-now” view. If you don’t have access to old photos, or you don’t have time to reproduce this process, here is a way to simulate this “old and new” look using Photoshop. Many thanks to Christian Meermann for his submission to today’s Workbench.

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Image for Photoshop Workbench 236: Canon Multiple-Exposure Script

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The ability to capture multiple exposures broadens the universe of creative possibilities. Most Nikon cameras possess a multiple-exposure feature. With this feature, it’s possible in-camera to create soft-glow montages, multi-image montages, multiple-exposure Monets, multiple-exposure tilts, and multiple-exposure rotate and zoom montages. Unfortunately, Canon cameras don’t possess a multiple-exposure feature, but don’t despair, I have good news. Uwe Steinmueller, editor of the Outback Photo website, authored a marvelous free Photoshop script that makes it extremely easy for Canon users to combine exposures in Photoshop. Although it’s not possible to preview these images on the camera’s LCD in the field, this script is the next best thing.

To begin the process, Canon users must capture a series of individual exposures with the intention of blending them into one using Uwe’s script. For example, if your goal is to create a multiple-exposure Monet appearance, capture between 2 and 10 individual frames where you move the camera in minuscule amounts between each frame. Here’s an example of the individual frames.

Then, when you return to your computer, go to http://handbook.outbackphoto.com/section_photo_tuning_filters/index.html and scroll to the bottom of the page. Locate the Free Scripts header and download the “DOP_LayerOpacityBlending” script.

Close Photoshop.

The downloaded script appears as a folder. Open the folder and copy the “DOP_LayerStackOpacityBlending.jsx” and “DOP_LayerStackOpacityBlending_Integrated.jsx” files into the Photoshop/Presets/Scripts folder. The Mac path is Applications/Adobe Photoshop/Presets/Scripts. On a PC, the path is C::/Program Files/Adobe/Photoshop/Presets/Scripts.

Open Photoshop.

Choose File>Scripts>DOP_LayerStackOpacityBlending_Integrated.

In the Load Layers dialog, click the Browse button. Locate the individually exposed frames and Shift-click to select the entire range. Press Open. Click OK to launch the script.

When it is done, you will see an image that looks just as though you created an in-camera multiple exposure.

In most cases, you can significantly improve the appearance by adding a Curves adjustment layer to increase contrast.

If you’re interested in learning more about multiple-exposure techniques, I teach these techniques in many of my workshops, including those that I co-teach with Charles Needle and Bobbie Turner, and my weeklong RMSP Boulder workshop. Visit my workshops page to find out more.

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Image for Photoshop Workbench 235: Taking Advantage of Symmetry When Retouching

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In a live Photoshop session during a recent RMSP workshop, Nancy Ortowski submitted this lovely image of the Boulder Theater. Nancy wanted to know if it’s possible to remove the lamp post from the right side of the scene. Normally, this would present a significant retouching challenge, but due to the theater’s symmetry, we were able to graft almost painlessly from one side of the theater to the other. Here’s what we leaned…

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Image for Photoshop Workbench 234: Game Changing Edits in Adobe Camera Raw 6.1

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In today’s Workbench, we’ll use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) 6.1’s powerful inventory of features to breath life into an already stunning image submitted by Bev Robertson. If you don’t have ACR 6.1, you’ll first need to upgrade to Photoshop CS5, then you can download 6.1 for free by opening Bridge and choosing Help>Updates.

Since Bev’s image is a TIFF, our first step is to enable ACR to open TIFF files. To accomplish this, we’ll choose Adobe Bridge CS5>Camera Raw Preferences (PC: Edit>Camera Raw Preferences). At the base of the dialog in the JPEG and TIFF Handling section, change the TIFF pull-down to Automatically open TIFFs with settings and press OK. Now, in Bridge’s Content panel, Control-click (PC: Right-click) on the Tiff thumbnail and choose Open in Camera Raw from the pop-up menu.

Due to several big improvements, such as significantly improved noise reduction, better post-crop vignetting, and enhanced image quality, ACR is now officially part of my HDR workflow. When I release my HDR eBook later this summer, I’ll explain why. Since our goal in this Workbench is to improve Bev’s image, we’ll only visit panels and tools that will help us achieve our goal. Some of the fun things we’ll encounter include noise reduction, targeted saturation adjustments, post-crop vignetting, and local corrections using the Adjustment Brush.

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