The New Photoshop, CS5

I'm digging in again after the book blitz. I have so much to do. I am learning CS5, the latest version of Photoshop. Doing the book gave me the opportunity to use some of the new features but there are others to explore. So far one of the best new features is the improved noise reduction in Camera Raw. I was using a third party plug-in that did a good job but I like to keep all my workflow in Photoshop. Makes my life simplier.

Selection and layer improvements are appreciated. In general Adobe fixed a lot of little things that just make the workflow smoother. Then there are a couple of things that have changed which aggravate me and I'm sure that there is some way to go back to the old way but I haven't had time to figure that out yet.

There are two new things that might be helpful for commercial photographers and they get a lot of play on videos touting the new Photoshop version but I doubt I'll use them much. One of them is the content aware fill. I've tried it. Sometimes it doesn't work very well but other times it can fix something that you would have sat at the computer for a long time gradually filling the area. It worked for me when I wanted to take an ADT sign out of one of the images in the book. Zap! It was gone. The other is puppet warp. The tutorial videos are amazing but I don't think it is a feature that I will use.

So, okay. I've paid my Adobe Photoshop tax. I'm probably good to go for another 18 months.

I made the image above last February. We went to Mass at the Chorro Church. Some Mexican friends say that prayers made in that church have been answered. It is a tiny church and the service was beautiful. I said my prayers. I also made a few photos with my little point & shoot camera the Canon S90 at 800 ISO. The camera starts to get a bit noisy at higher ISO's so I used the noise reduction in CS5 and the Post Crop Vignette. They worked very well.