Adobe Photoshop, known as the leading program for creating and editing images for websites, offers a user-friendly interface, a full set of tools, and a vast number of reference materials. Whether you need to work with shadows, gradients, angles, or patterns, Photoshop makes it simple. Plus, Adobe consistently releases new versions of Photoshop to improve the web design process. This time is no different. With the introduction of the new Photoshop Creative Cloud (CC) 2014, Adobe provides countless features and upgrades to enhance your digital imaging experience.
Adobe Photoshop CC, 2014
This graphic and editing program developed by Adobe is used to create UI elements, web graphics, functional mock ups and wireframes. This new and improved version brings a raft of time-saving improvements and lots of improved features. These features actually add up to the worthwhile set of improvement.
What’s new in Photoshop CC?
Improved front previews and Typekit
Photoshop CC, 2014 introduces significant updates to the Text tool. You can now select your fonts faster with the font preview feature. Just hover over a font in the options bar, and your text will update instantly. If a font has multiple styles, instead of pressing the up and down keys repeatedly to switch fonts, you can hold the shift key while pressing them to skip styles and move to the next font. Additionally, there’s a green icon next to the font, showing that it’s from Typekit (fonts available for free with your Creative Cloud membership). Click this green icon, and the Typekit website will open in your browser, logging you in automatically. You can then choose the font you want and sync it to your computer. With Typekit, you can
- You can filter the fonts list to show fonts only from the Typekit
- Search font by simply typing it
- Be aware of which fonts are missing and available on Typekit.
Smart guides
As you know how important it is line up items correctly, with the correct amount of spacing in between different objects. However, with Photoshop CC and its improved Smart Guides, you can create relative distance between different elements and position things much more efficiently and quickly. A few quick steps to use smart guides
- Select the move tool
- Hold control key (on windows), or command key (on Mac OS X)
- Magenta lines will appear pointing out the distance between the selected layers and the canvas
- You can point your mouse over the other layer if you want to measure the distance between two different layers
- If you want to change the measurements away from the default option, enable the Rulers. You can do this by Control key or command+R, and then right click on Ruler to choose the measurements you want.
Create color look-up tables
Although the color lookup adjustment layer introduced in Photoshop CS6, was not used much, now you can create your own color lookup tables inside Photoshop quite easily. Take a look at the following steps
- Create your color effect using any adjustment layer
- Go to File>Export>Color Lookup Tables
- Give your Lookup table a name and select the format you’d like to save
- Click Ok and save your file.
You can also adjust the quality and enhance the accuracy of color effect by adding more grid points.
Create realistic motion and spin blur effects
With the new Path and Spin blur modes for the Blur Gallery Filter, you can create realistic motion blur or circular motion blur. The filter added can be edited after applied and path set by the filter determines the blur’s direction. The users can adjust the direction, speed of the blur effect, change the ellipse’s size, shape of the blur and taper blurs at the end of the path.
With spin blur, users can edit the shape, size and rotation and the amount of blur applied to the area. With feather handles, the users can change the range of distance from the blur to the edges of ellipse which gives a seamless application of the effect.
Better layer comps
You can now position layers for all of the comps within the ‘Layers Comps’ panel and modify attributes of layers, visible layers and position for a select amount of Layer Comps. In simple words, if you want to create multiple variations or compositions of the same artwork, use layer comps panel. This makes easier to see how changes will affect different comps saved in your file.
Improved smart object
Smart Objects let you embed a file to your Photoshop document and enables you to edit that Linked Smart Objects. Your file automatically gets saved. You can also edit your file, updated your Linked Smart Object and this will update your Photoshop document with the new file. With Photoshop CC, 2014, simply right click any Embedded Smart Object and choose convert to link to make your Embedded Smart Object a Linked Smart Object.
3D printing and editing
With this new release of Photoshop CC, you can also enhance 3D printing capabilities with print preview dialog. You can easily choose your 3D printer and material and then print. As you select the printer, print preview window will open. With print preview dialog, you get a realistic preview of the model with improved ray tracking and realistic lighting. Also it ensures stability of your print. Photoshop fix the water tightness problem and build framework model to hold your 3D model to prevent it from collapsing in the middle of the print.
Not only this, Photoshop CC also helps in 3D editing. Photoshop CC can open OBJ files with multiple groups and meshes. In addition, there’s also an improvement to the texture properties dialog. You can rename your texture instead of modifying it by checkmarking ‘Apply to matching textures’ option and Photoshop will automatically do it for you.
Enhanced Photoshop generator
Photoshop CC 2014, has enabled the following enhancement to generator functionalities
- You can select to save image assets generated from particular layers or groups of layers in a subfolder directly under the document’s asset folder
- You can set document-wide default settings for the generated assets. In order to specify the default settings, create an empty layer and set its name with the keyword default.
Focus mask
Post processing an image inside Photoshop centers around generating, manipulating and saving selections. With Photoshop CC, 2014, you get to work with a new feature called Focus Mask that examines which areas of an image are in focus and automatically select these parts. The focus mask makes selections based on the depth of field of an image. You can employ the Add tool or Subtract From Brush to denote areas which are either in or out of focus, thereby allowing the mask to include or exclude those portions from the final selection.
Color bending algorithm
The content-aware tools can now create better results with new color bending algorithm. In order to remove or add any image within an image, perform the following tasks
- Make a selection of the area you want to remove/add
- Fill and switch the mode to Content-Aware
- Enable color adaptation
- To enable color adaptation, click on adaptation configuration button and set the color strength setting to any number from 0 to 10. The higher the number, the stronger is the color adaptation
- Checkmark and click OK.
You can also adjust the structure setting with a value from 1 to 5 to determine how strong the patches should adhere to the patterns in the image.
Photoshop CC is highly versatile and very powerful. You can also speed up Photoshop CC and get your work done quickly.