Photoshop CC 2018
We find out what’s new in the latest version of the industry-leading painting program.
You can now store your various brushes into folders, which is a godsend for artists with hundreds of brushes
Price £20/month Company Adobe Web www.adobe.com
Gone are the days of Adobe releasing a new Photoshop package every other year, with a collection of new tools that it thinks will be popular for designers. Creative Cloud means more updates, more often, and such is the digital age that the Photoshop audience now has a voice regarding the features that the software needs.
With the 2018 version of Photoshop, digital art is the focus of what’s new. Adobe rarely revolutionises its software packages these days – it’s more gentle evolution – but the updates to Photoshop are most welcome, and we’re confident that they’ll be become part of most artists’ workflows.
The Brush tool is the big talking point this year. One of the simpler ideas of the update, you can now store your various brushes into folders, which is a godsend for artists with hundreds of brush files stored on their computer. Each brush now has a name and a quick preview beside it, so that you’ll never confuse two brushes again, and you’re free to create your own folders, too. Given how important layers have been to graphic designers, the Brush tool’s folders could well prove to be one of best updates for digital art management in years; you can even convert .tpl files to .abr within Photoshop now. Organisation within the program is better than ever.
Another relatively straightforward update, Adobe has added a Smoothing option to the Brush tool. Rather like the Lazy Nezumi plug-in, you can now almost drag the brush for a far more controlled finish to your
sketch; choose between 0 and 100 per cent to alter just how smooth you’d like the brush to be, and watch the little “leash” icon as you’re drawing to control.
Smoothness must have been a key area that Adobe felt Photoshop needed work on, as the brand new Curvature Pen tool is similarly userfriendly and capable of creating more natural lines. The results of these features are immensely satisfying: give it another year, and you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.
Along with all the mouth-watering changes to the illustrative tools, there are other subtle tweaks across the program, which may come in useful, too. There’s a Learn panel now to help beginners get to grips with tools in basic tutorials, while the Properties panel, Select and Mask and Camera Raw features have all seen improvements in this edition. There’s also the option to access your Lightroom photos in Photoshop now as well, for CC subscribers who love cross-editing.
In the coming months, there’ll no doubt be further tweaks related to this update. For now though, CC 2018 is a much-needed evolution for the industry standard, with plenty of new options to get stuck into.