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New features for Photoshop


There have been rumours floating around for a little while that Adobe was about to unveil Retina support in Photoshop; those have been confirmed today, along with some other new features for Creative Cloud subscribers.

Whether you have a Photoshop licence or a subscription to Creative Cloud, there's an update available to provide support for HiDPI displays.

If you're a Creative Cloud member your update will also enable to following:

  • Smart Object support in the Blur gallery and with the liquify feature
  • The ability to quickly export CSS code for text and objects as well as import colour swatches to help design incredible websites more easily
  • Crop tool refinements and other timesaving features in the workflow
  • 3D enhancements including improved live previews of shadow effects and additional control over illumination using 32-bit colour picker to create glow effects
  • Conditional Actions that automatically select the appropriate action based on user-defined rules, giving users enhanced image processing speed.

There have also been some updates to Creative Cloud as a whole as well as other Creative Cloud products, not just its Photoshop features. You can now subscribe to Creative Cloud on a team basis; Creative Cloud Connection allows for desktop synching, a la Dropbox; and there's also Creative Cloud Training, which provides members with a library of tutorials and trial courses.

If you're not like one of the one million people already subscribed to Creative Cloud, an annual subscription comes in at £38.12 a month (excluding VAT). Creative Cloud for teams is more expensive whilst there are discounts for for students, teachers, and existing Adobe customers with CS3 or later.

Offering Photoshop updates to Creative Cloud subscribers before they're rolled out to stand-alone licence-holders is clearly a perk of the package, but there's been no indication when these new features (barring the retina support) will be rolled out to everyone. Combined with the discount for CS3+ licence holders, I'm intrigued to see if this is the beginning of a steady enforced obsoletion of the individual package, and a move to a subscription-only package.

Something to keep an eye on.