Lucky 13: Adobe’s Photoshop Makeover

Photoshop 13 (part of the Adobe CS6 creative suite) is now shipping, and its drastically new interface is sure to ruffle a few feathers.

Following in the footsteps of photographer’s tools such as Apple’s Aperture, Capture One and Adobe’s own Lightroom, Photoshop 13 has adopted the serious and foreboding “dark grey” interface.

There are actually four grey color schemes, one darker and two lighter than the default. The lightest restores Photoshop to its more traditional look. Bridge shares these same color schemes, so you can easily keep them in sync. And Illustrator has adopted them too.

Also, the floating “panels” have been combined into one unified window with a solid backdrop which Adobe calls an “Application Frame”. This was actually first implemented in Photoshop 12 (CS4), but is now turned on by default. It can however be disabled, fully restoring Photoshop CS6 to its CS5 look and feel.

In CS4, Adobe changed the tab fonts to uppercase. It was a “change for the sake of change” which took up more space and made the tabs harder to read. However in this version it has been “fixed” by reverting back to upper and lower case.

Those of you who live and die by Camera Raw are in for a bit of a shock. Recovery and Fill Light are gone, replaced by “Highlights” and “Shadows”. Brightness has also been removed and replaced by “Whites”. All of these are now bi-directional sliders meaning that negative values are possible. The good news is that settings previously made in Camera Raw 6.x show up with the previous interface’s sliders. In fact, you can set the RAW 6.x sliders to their default values and save them as a preset so you can still use the Recovery, Fill Light, and Brightness sliders in ACR 7 if you want to. However you cannot have both the sliders from ACR 6 and ACR 7 at the same time.

This new approach seems more logical. Exposure and Brightness may seem redundant to many, despite their use of different algorithms. And it’s not unreasonable to want to lighten the highlights or darken the shadows, the opposite of recovery and fill light. To compensate for the loss of the Brightness slider, Adobe has given the Exposure slider a five-stop range instead of four.

Photoshop’s interface has been much improved by separating the adjustments and properties into two separate windows. Now, when you double-click an adjustment layer, the properties panels pops up like a dialog box, and goes away when you click on something else if you have “hide iconic panels” checked in interface preferences. This is great for saving valuable screen real estate.

At first glance, Bridge remains relatively unchanged. They did change the interface slightly by eliminating the alternate light/dark rows in the Metadata panel. This reduces the readability somewhat, but it comes at the welcome expense of fixing an annoying problem. Previously when you clicked on a single field, all the fields became active which was very distracting. Now, only the field you click on is highlighted. Happily, the alternating light/dark rows remain in the Keywords and Filter panel.

There are lots of other features to explore, which we’ll roll out as time progresses. And only time will tell if the many bugs in CS5 have been resolved. But so far, this looks like one of the more noteworthy releases of Photoshop.