Adobe released a public beta of Photoshop CS6 yesterday, along with some release notes regarding the new UI, better performance, and newly added features.
The beta is available in trial form (though I’m unsure when it expires) from Adobe. I downloaded it this morning and have spent a bit of time dabbling. For those of you who haven’t yet grabbed the download, here are some screenshots and observations (click image to view larger size). Feel free to ask me questions about features and changes and I’ll look into them.
The interface has gone to the dark side! Many things have changed.
The main window now functions as a kind of "drawing board." It's always there even when you float your windows. This comes with the advent of tabs in Photoshop (cool feature).
Paragraph styles in Photoshop? Way cool, especially for web designers.
They changed the icon again...
Interesting. The darker color could be easier on the eyes…
Yeah, I’ve always used a dark color scheme in Bridge and Lightroom for that reason.
What’s that you’re designing in the first screenshot?
It’s actually not my design, I got it from Orman Clark over at Premium Pixels. It’s an imitation Twitter interface (previous version, I think).
They finally caught up to the $80 Paint Shop Pro Photo X3…
Seriously, that does look a lot like PSPP X3. http://www.the-graphics-tablet.com/image-files/psp4-edit-screen.jpg (small image, but you can kind of see it). Dark scheme, tabbed files, those are all attributes that PSPP has had since about 2009. But, since Corel insists on billing it a “photo editing tool”, it doesn’t get any respect.
Wow, interesting. I hadn’t seen the PSPP interface before (always been a Photoshop kind of guy!), but the two look remarkably alike. Pixelmator (http://www.pixelmator.com/) also has a dark interface. Actually, several other Adobe products do as well – Bridge (it’s optional, but you can make it darker) and Lightroom. I think I could get used to it in PS, but it would certainly take some adjustment!