Meet New Features in Photoshop 2020
FOR ANYONE WHO SPOTTED THE CREATIVE CLOUD APP chugging and downloading recently, well, it was Photoshop getting a big update. Adobe seems to have dropped the CC moniker, although Creative Cloud is very much still with us. Version 2020 (or 21) of the venerable imageediting app brings a swathe of improvements across the whole face of the app, but stops short of fundamentally changing the look and feel, which has been set since the dark gray background made its appearance several years ago.
Some of the changes are to tools that have been the same since forever—the Brush tool, for instance, can now be rotated with the arrow keys while you’re painting, and hitting tilde (~) flips it into an eraser. The Properties panel, much unloved, has been revitalized with shortcuts to useful tools, depending on what you’ve got selected. Then there’s the Sensei cloud tech of which Adobe is so proud, further integrated into Photoshop with the new Object Selection tool.
So, while it’s not a breathtaking reinvention of the app, the latest updates are sure to calm the troubled brows of subscribers, who get an updated app without having to fork out over $600, like in the old days.
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OBJECT SELECTION
This is probably the headline new feature, because it’s a bit like magic. Users of Photoshop Elements 2019 will already be familiar with it, because—bafflingly—it appeared in CC’s cutdown little brother a full year before coming to the main suite. Perhaps it was some sort of test. Whatever, it’s here now, and mostly works. If there’s an object clearly defined against a clear background, it’s able to select it just fine. If the dividing line isn’t clear, or if the object and background are the same color, it can have difficulty. Even so, it’s usually enough to get you straight to the Select and Mask stage, perhaps filling in a few gaps first with the Quick Selection brush, rather than fiddling about making a fully manual selection.
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USING OBJECT SELECTION
You’ll find the Object Selection tool buried in the toolbar along with the rest of the selection tools. It looks like a square with an arrow beside it. To use it, drag a rectangle around the object you want to select, and let go. The app does the rest. There’s a couple of options, however. One is that, instead of dragging a rectangle, you can use a version of the Polygonal Lasso to more precisely outline the object you want to be selected. And when it works, it works very well, as you can see on our picture of an orca [ Image A]. The selection outline has tightly wrapped to the division between whale and sea, even though this isn’t the sharpest photo, leaving us just one area below the fin to touch up. Our other image, of the kangaroo, however, fared less well. Even using the lasso wasn’t enough to get the program to select the lower back leg, a consequence of the animal being a very similar color to its background [ Image B].
Using Photoshop’s existing Select Subject functionality caught much of the lower leg, but also added the rock behind the kangaroo’s head.
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IMPROVED PROPERTIES
Elsewhere, the Properties panel has been shown a little love. If you’re working on a single Background layer, you now get options to change the size of your canvas, including its bit depth and color mode—it’s now a fast way to change an image to grayscale without bothering the “Image” menu. There are also shortcuts to show and hide rulers, guides, and the grid, and Quick
Actions including Crop and Image Size. Select a layer, and you have access to Transform, Align, and Distribute controls, again without having to seek them out in their usual hiding place, and the superb new Remove Background, a riff on Object Selection that selects the subject and separates it and its background into a Layer Mask [ Image C]. It suffers from the same problems as Object Selection, but it’s nice to see it included. Selecting a type is particularly well supported, with full formatting support on the Properties panel, along with the ability to convert type to frames or shapes. Selecting a Smart Object brings up a different set of options, too, including the new “Convert to Layers” option.
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CONVERT TO LAYERS
You can now convert a Smart Object to plain old pixel layers. You could do this before, by opening up a Smart Object and dragging the layers within back to the Layers palette, but now you can do it with a click from the Properties panel. Multiple layers within the Smart Object become a layer group, and you can choose to retain or discard Smart Filters or applied transformations.
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CONTENT-AWARE FILL
The magic object eraser gets some extra options in the form of its own panel and preview window, still triggered from the “Edit” menu. Now you have control over the sampling area used to generate the fill, and can tint it any color, so you know where you’re working [ Image D]. There’s also a couple of extra modes in addition to the Auto setting, so you can choose a plain rectangular sample, or draw your own with a brush. There’s also the option to output to your current layer, a new one, or create a duplicate to keep both versions.
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EVERYTHING ELSE
There are also changes to the Warp tool, enabling you to place control points anywhere with Altclick [ Image E]. If you’ve got a selection outline in place, this warps, too. Free Transform gets a nudge in the right direction by no longer requiring you to hold Shift all the time—it’s now constrained by default. You can switch back to the old behavior in Preferences if your muscle memory complains. The Lens Blur filter now has a “Set Focal Point” button for working with depth-mapped images, and Presets—the gradients and patterns that have been the same for 20 years—get a shake up with new content and new ways of working. Panels such as Swatches and Styles have also been reworked, making the switching of colors in a composition much easier.