Adobe Photoshop CC: Subscription Only, Shake Reduction, Better Raw
At its Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles today, Adobe announced Photoshop CC, the next version of its flagship photo editing software. Unlike version that came before it, Photoshop CC will only be offered through Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription plan.
In other words, the Creative Suite line is coming to an end, and Creative Suite 6 will be the last in the series. Gone are the days in which you purchase a boxed copy of Adobe software.
Photoshop CC will have a number of upgrades over Photoshop CS6. Major ones are a new image deblurring/sharpening feature, and new Camera Raw capabilities. The new program merges features that were previously found in Photoshop standard and Photoshop Extended.
That magical camera shake blur reduction tool that has been dropping jaws since 2011 will be appearing in the new program. It uses fancy algorithms to reduce the blur caused by camera shake:
There’s also a new Smart Sharpen tool that minimizes noise and halos quite giving photos much more sharpness:
Adobe Camera Raw 8 has three new capabilities for editing RAW files: an Advanced Healing brush that “heals” and “patches” images with a brush stroke, a new Radial Gradient for drawing attention to the focus of a photo without applying a standard vignette, and an Upright tool that straightens horizons and applies perspective corrections.
Camera Raw edits can also be applied to layers within Photoshop CC itself, without having to open up the Adobe Camera Raw window.
Adobe Photoshop CC will be available to Creative Cloud customers starting in June 2013. You’ll need to subscribe to Creative Cloud for $50 per month to use all of the new CC programs, or subscribe to Photoshop CC itself for $20 per month.
