With Adobe Photoshop Cs5 Now Shipping, Drend Rasprohuit Sees If Photographers Really Should Upgrade.

I had taken a picture of a French manor house

, which was perfect, except that a gardener was standing in front of it. Using the lasso tool, I drew very roughly around the man and pressed Delete. The Fill dialogue box appeared. Into that, I chose content-aware fill. Photoshop, almost magically, replaced the gardener with the brickwork and the climbing plant that he was standing in front of. It was as though he had never been there. Of course, its not the actual brickwork or plant that Adobe Photoshop recreates, but the progams guess is fantastically convincing.

Before content-aware fill, removing the gardener would have taken me ages to achieve with cloning tools. Actually, given the complexity of the plant, I would probably have just thrown out the picture.

Content-aware fill has other uses, too. If an image needs rotating because the horizontal lines in it are at an angle, the rotation leaves gaps at the edge of the picture. In the old days, I had to crop the picture to fix this, even when the cropping meant that composition of the photo suffered. Now I can use the fill feature, instead, and get the composition that I was after.

Frankly, this feature is such a time saver that it justifies the cost of the upgrade on its own, but theres more.

Perfect exposure

Adobe has overhauled how it deals with high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging. This geeky-sounding name refers to very contrasty photographs where it is difficult to get both the highlights and the shadows correctly exposed.

While camera manufacturers have invested a lot of research into increasing the megapixels of their cameras, theyve so far done little to make cameras see the full range of light (from dark shadows to very bright highlights) that the human eye can. The result is that many photographs have very good foreground detail but the sky above is blown out it appears as plain white, with the clouds and blue background ignored by the camera.

Up until now, Ive solved this technical problem in the traditional way, which is to attach graduated filters see-through sheets of resin to the front of my lenses. The top half of these filters is shaded. This makes skies darker, which reduces the dynamic range of the image and ensures that the camera exposes the whole of the picture correctly.

The problem with filters is that they work best when a horizon is a straight line. Good-quality filters are also expensive to buy and some extreme wide-angle lenses have bulging fronts that prevent standard filters from being attached.

Enter HDR. The photographer takes three images one exposed for the highlights, one for the midtones and one for the shadows. These are then merged in software to create a perfectly exposed image from top to bottom.

Photographers have often relied upon third-party plug-ins for HDR, but with Photoshops new HDR Pro feature, this is unlikely to last. The HDR Pro window is easier to use than its predecessor in CS4. Merging images is also speedier, and importantly theres now a de-ghosting option to help compensate for movement thats occurred between the merged shots (caused, for example, by wind blowing on trees).

Being old-school, I still prefer using filters to HDR most of the time as they mean less work on the computer after shooting. But many photographers have enthusiastically adopted HDR as their preferred technique and Photoshop will support them well.

by: Werture Mozella Metoxen

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