Adobe CS6 Preliminary Experience
Posted by bpham on Mar 4, 2012 in Blog | 5 comments
In the last few days, having installing Adobe CS6 on my workstation and used it to post-process a few pictures, I’ve already begun to like this new version. Of course, to be sure, I’m probably scratching only a few percents of what this new version is capable of, and since my focus primarily on photography, I’m just describing my real experiences using it for photography only. The purpose of this blog is to get you started and share some tips that I’ve learned just in case you’ll want to install this pre release just to have a taste of it.
Note: this blog is only applicable to Windows 7 platform.
Some tips on installing it:
- Install it into a different directory than your bread/butter CS5 version so you can always switch back and forth to compare and if you want to de-install this CS6, you can do so without damaging your CS5 installation. In my case, I call it Adobe_6 as opposed to the normal Adobe directory.
- If you have many plug-in’s such as Nik, Topaz, etc…, you don’t have to reinstall these plug-in’s most of the cases. All you have to do is to copy what have been installed in the other Adobe CS5 directory/files in the /plugin sub-directory for these plugins into the similar CS6′s. Exit CS6 and restart, and they’re ready to be used. Some plug-ins are not compatible with CS6 so you’ll have to wait for updates.
- After installation, you’ll just create a short-cut of the “photoshop.exe” from the Adobe_6 installation directory and place it on your desktop, and you’re now having 2 different versions of Photoshop on your machine.
My first impression about this newly updated CS6 is, and remember that I only used this for a couple of days, favorable. Most note-worthies are:
- Because CS6 has the ability to save your work in the background while you’re working on your photo’s, when you need to save it for any reason, like exiting Photoshop, etc…, the saving speed is almost instantaneous. This also makes sure that if it crashes, you’d not lose a lot of time already spent. Occasionally, in CS5, I did lose some of my work, after spending hours with it, and it was frustrating to redo what I did. For this feature alone, I think it is worth it to upgrade, but as I know, this is NOT the only feature, just one of the features that I’ve noticed to be invaluable. Sure, you can save your work manually, but how many times that I forgot to do so in CS5 and in the end, I lost all my work when it crashed.
- The new, darker interface really does help me to focus on the picture that I’m working on, and makes the end results look nicer by comparison to CS5 interface. I did exit CS6, opened up CS5 with the same picture, and after that, I don’t want to use CS5 anymore. For this, Adobe has done a good job of changing its interface and the colors. You can change the interface colors to 4 different level of darkness if you want to, but I chose the darkest option, which I think is best.
- After 5 minutes of using it, I already got used to the new look and everything that I used in CS5 seems to be unchanged in CS5, things like short-cut keys, etc…, so there is virtually no learning curve with your existing CS5 knowledge.
- CS6 seems to perform faster than CS5, in terms of most everything that I’ve tried, including bringing large pictures ( sizes > 1G) and of course in terms of saving them as mentioned above. Everything seems to work as expected. As I said, I’ve not used the new features so that will come later.
So far that is my impression, I think it is not much, but at least this would get you started with CS6. The more I use this version, the more I’ll learn about the new features/enhancements to old ones, I will update this blog.
If there is one knit-pick, I would say that, maybe this is a pre release, and therefore this issue could be a bug. Every time that I click on the tool box icons, the CS6 seems to refresh or flicker some other parts of the screen, and this issue is kind of annoying and makes it look like it slows it down somewhat, but I think this is just a perception (I meant the slowness, not the flickering issue).
Hope this helps.
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I was wondering, have you played around with the new “sneaks?” If so, how easy are they for the completely uninitiated? Meaning, could you see those features making it into a Photoshop Elements version, where it would take very very little effort to achieve the effects they portray in the sneaks videos?
Also, what are the specs for the machine you tested psCS6?
thanks.
Mark,
I’m learning the new features too just by reading the documents and try to see what are the new features that I will basically use most often and most useful to me in terms of photography related. I also search youtube for video materials that demonstrates clearly some of the new features, and actually this is the best way to learn since you can watch the video instead of just words and pictures. One of them is very useful on brushes that I will for sure be using.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PJY6TpQe8E
Another great source to learn CS6 is to look for new materials from Lynda.com, whose tutorial videos are outstanding, in my opinion.
Most features that are useful for photography are not that hard to master, provided that you’ve been working with pPotoshop and have enough experience and understand certain basic things like layers, mask, channel, path, etc… so it really depends on your experience and knowledge therefore it is difficult to say, so your mileage varies. As to whether these new features will make it into Photoshop Elements, in my opinion, it is difficult to say since most of these features are basically advanced editing features and Photoshop Elements is not meant to be for that purpose. I would recommend that you’ll spend the time learning Photoshop because of its power and flexibility and once you’ll know it well enough, you’ll take your photos to the next level. I’m still learning different techniques to improve upon my post processing skills and never learn enough…
Hope this helps.
Mark, forgot to tell you that my machine is a Windows 7, dual core Intel 3.2Mz with 8G of RAM, and it runs fine. The key is to make sure that you have enough RAM, at least 4G, but I recommend 8G, since most of the time, I open both Lightroom and CS5 or CS6 for my workflow. I used to have 4G RAM and it was slow when I opened up many tools, so 8G is very good.
I agree with you that CS6 works faster than CS5. I always felt my problems with CS5 cursor resizing stalls, requiring me to use the sliders instead of bracket keys were a result of not having enough ram (only have 4 gigs), but apparently that is not the case.
I haven’t used CS6 much, but I already love it for its peppiness.
Isabel,
Just downloaded the Beta version, apparently this version is much better than the prerelease and looks more like a production version. Wow, after viewing video on some of the new features and I used 2 features immediately on one of my recent photo trip to Joshua Tree NP. Please look at that blog on some of the tips that I have on the blog. Love this CS6, and after using the beta for one day, I already don’t want to go back to CS5. Can’t wait to upgrade when it is available. The darker interface of CS6 is slick and does make your work stand out and therefore I’ve been more interested in working with it. Also very neat is the ability to edit video right in the interface that I’m familiar with. Thanks for the comment.