Photoshop CS5 and ACR 6.0 Now Available

Hey All!

I’m still away for this week but I have a few quick announcements.   First of all, my Photo A Day promotion is on and there are still a few backup spots left if you would like to apply for those (most of the back up spots were used last year.  We’ll see how things go this year, but I think it will be a go!).  Definitely check it out and apply if you’re interested!

Second, a few of you may have already heard, but Adobe CS5 has just been released!  I really wasn’t planning on upgrading right away this time.  Sure it has some neat things like content aware filling, and huge for Mac users is that its 64 bit (but I’m PC so good ol CS4 could utilize all 18 gigs of my sweet sweet RAM!), and some stuff with brush emulation and puppet warping and the like.  Neat stuff, but it wasn’t on the top of my purchase list at this very moment.  But then I started hearing about the new all the new things included in the new Adobe Camera RAW raw converted (6.0 at the moment) and I got excited!

So I downloaded the trial and only barely touched the controls before I had to head out and leave, but what I found has encouraged me to jump on this upgrade (Lightroom 3 should have the same feature set, but is only available as a BETA right now.  Not sure about upgrade costs etc yet).

The foundation of the new ACR 6.0 is a whole new RAW conversion.  Photographers have loved ACR (and lightroom) for its flexibility in powerful non-destructive editing, but it has lagged behind in overall RAW conversion (especially at High ISOs) compared to other software.  As confounded and convoluted Canon’s DPP software is, it could always extract a cleaner high ISO RAW image than adobe could, especially in regards to color noise.   But this changes with ACR 6.0!  CHroma noise?  GONE!  As in completely gone!  And the previously lackluster luminance noise controls?  Its still not amazing, but you now have control over magnitude, contrast and details – a huge improvement!

A welcome addition in the realm of Noise reduction is ironically the additional of a “grain” control, allowing the use of slightly more aggressive noise reduction to get rid of ugly noise and then replacing it with pleasant grain.  This generates an actually very realistic grain over your image in which you can control amplitude, size and roughness, creating some of the best artificial grain I’ve had a chance to experience.

Here are a few really quick shots from my 5D Mark II that I wanted to use to see the difference.  Ya, the shots a little out of focus, but the reason I chose this for an example was that it was shot at 6400 ISO and then push processed in ACR (bad exposure, tsk tsk).  And I was also short on time, haha.  With the old version I had to run additional noise reduction on this image before giving it to the client, but with this new version and the SAME EXACT SETTING, plus a touch of grain, the pattern noise almost fully disappeared, and the distracting color noise is gone.  See for yourself.

The improvements for me are pretty substantial, and when I get back to town I’ll be able to evaluate the prints I’ve tested with both old and new versions and see if the difference in print is as big as it is on the screen.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few more awesome features: 1) huge improvements in post-crop vignetting, and 2) a brand new and totally awesome looking Lens Correction module!  Now this module will be included in ACR 6.1 so its not available yet, but I’ve seem some demos and it looks out of this world.

Go to Adobe and download the trial if you want, but be warned – you’ll probably want to upgrade after that

Lots to post when I’m back, and remember to check out those Photo A Day sessions!

~
Justin