CS5 is here

Well, I got the email at 1am this morning. CS5 is available for download.
Over a Gig download. I guess I'll download and let install while I'm at work today.

I cant wait to try this out. so excited lol

Well, with a quick 30 minute test drive..

- Content Aware Fill .. AWESOME in demos. (Honestly, it didn't look that great in the demos either if you really looked at what it was doing... often a good start, but not *great*)
I took a portrait. Head shot with a somewhat plain black/grey background.
Cut a blank hole in the background. Space on all sides of the hole about the diameter of the hole I created. (so plenty of useable space to choose from)
Filled, and, well, WTF? The hole is half filled with portions of the subject's head!
I was hoping this would help with smoothing out and fixing backdrops. Maybe not so much.

- Refine Edge... Again, Awesome in the demos.
It acts a lot like the old Extract filter. i.e. solid areas get raggedly transparent, and semi-transparent areas just turn into a blocky mess. After a few tries, I got some better results. It seems this may be one item that has a large learning curve and will take some practice to get decent results.

- Paint brushes is actually pretty cool if you're into that. I think PaintShop Pro of four years ago still beats CS5, but it is a good start. I like seeing the brush angle from what is sensed by the drawing pad.

- *NO* Pentax camera/lens profiles for automatic lens correction. But their downloadable tool for creating profiles is quite simple to use and works pretty darned well!
In about 10 minutes (printing pattern through creating profile), I had a fairly decent profile.
Of course, for a zoom lens you need to repeat for each focal length. Distance and other factors apparently have some effect, so it can take some effort to create a good library.

- Puppet warp looks fun. Dunno how useful that will be for me.

Anyway, lots of play time ahead.

The content fill is something you need to learn, it's not so magic as they say it is.
When you catch a very small edge of something it goes all wrong I notice.
You need to make a small egde around the problem area so the the program knows better how to fill it in.

here i've used it on this shot, it's on the girls shirt near a pattern. It was quite big around the size of the pink flowers in the middle of her shirt. Now can you tell me where it was?



It does that with the new brushes!

Thank you i didn't knew that, I hope Pentax will convert their profile into one compatible with Adobe. I think it's ajust a matter of time.

Well im loveing it so far, just been haveing a play its so far so good, way better than the old spot healing tool, also like the content aware for panoramics, going to install it tonight on my system at home and get to work i think lol

MMMMM not to sure now, well yes it has helped me this eveing in stitching and changeing a panoramic image, however cs5 keeps telling me that i dont have enough ram and fails to complete what i want doing, i am guessing this is down to the image size1 more testing needed will post pics later

How much RAM do you have? Have you set the scratch discs in an optimum way?

I have two hard disks in this PC - one has Photoshop on it and the other is set as the primary scratch disk. This does improve performance.

Yes its a well specked system, intel quad core running at 3.2 ghz, 8 gig of ram and a 64 bit operating system, 2 hard drives as scratch pads, The image is huge though

19738 by 4954

Comprised of 4 images stitched together, from what i am aware of the new cs5 content aware tool is memory hungry and its even doing this on mac g5 towers etc, In work tomorrow i am building an intel i7 system, with 16gig ram and the ati 5890 raphics card, for a customer, So I am going to try it out on that and see what happens

Is it necessary to have such a big image? Perhaps something smaller would give you a fighting chance.

4 images? What on earth are you shooting with?!?

I have a panoramic of 19189 x 3716 (10 images from my K10D), and my computer (2.4GHz Dual Core Athlon with 4Gb RAM) running Elements 4 copes with that okay. Must be CS5, I reckon.

Dan

I'm using the gx20 it was just 4 images shot in raw,

The dimensions of a GX20 image are 4688 x 3120. 4 images with no overlap would only be either 18752 x 3120 or 12480 x 4688. So you must be interpolating to increase the resolution of each image before stitching, presumably to increase the print size.

It might be easier to do the panorama at native resolution, then upsize once all the other processing is done.

Dan