I am no way saying that this should replace Photoshop alltogether, but there’s now a plugin that bring all of the best tools of Photoshop into Photoshop Elements, which is much cheaper than the full version of PS. 

Check out the details here: 
http://fstoppers.com/get-most-of-photoshops-tools-and-features-without-buying-the-full-version-of-photoshop

Last month Adobe did a private beta testing for the new Adobe CS7 with their re-imagined set of tools. I was fortunate to be invited to be a private tester. I wanted to give you a guys a run down of what you guys can expect. I’m really excited to share these features with you. 

New healing brush: 

Our old favorite healing brush has been reprogrammed to do a few new tricks. It’s much smarter, similar to how vibrance is to saturation. It understands where edges are. So whenever you heal next to an edge, it retains the fidelity of that edge. It will heal any object on an edge while still keeping the edge looking normal. 

So if you have a flyaway going across the edge of the face with the background close to it, it won’t turn murky. It will remove it and keep that edge looking normal. 

It also allows you to easily make hair look perfect. If you have a great hair style with a few hairs misplaced, you can remove them easily without any problems. So getting ‘perfect hair’ is much easier since it won’t turn the hair ugly. It takes ‘content aware’ to another direction. I don’t know how they coded it but it seems to do a lot more calculations by making use of our graphics card, processor and ram. 

Transition Wand: 

In portrait retouching, one time consuming aspect is the time spent dodging and burning skin to get those perfect transitions. In pixel terms, these are basically just darker pixels surrounding lighter pixels that need to be corrected or vice versa. Similar to how the ‘refine edge’ tool works, you take this tool and select a certain area with a brush, it then generated a perfect transition which you can dial back in regards to skin tones. It emulates dodging and burning so well with the precise controls. I am shocked! 

Auto Blemish Removal: 

This is a new filter that Adobe has placed into CS7 which is the most fascinating of all. 

Located near the top next to liquify, this tool looks almost like dust and scratches filter, where it generates a look that is a little strong in the beginning. What this filter does it analyzes the skin tone range and looks for any discrepancies. So for example, if you have a range of skin being a certain value in color and luminosity, it sees where there are any changes in this average and targets it. Usually, these ‘changes’ are the blemishes themselves. It then corrects it based on the surrounding areas. You can fine tune how hard it looks or how relaxed it is via a few sliders. The result is quite incredible because you can mask it. So you can select what range of skin to look at and you can mask it once it is done working. 

Conclusion: 

I did a full retouch with these three tools and took just 15 minutes and it looks better than anything I have ever done! 

The best part about these three tools it always retains skin texture due the frequency which skin texture is usually on (assuming). The guys at Adobe really deserve a round of applause for the job they’ve done here.

There are quite a few more tools in their new tool set including a new interface. I have to keep the visuals under wraps for now. 

Expect CS 7 to potentially come out in October of this year.  

Oh and one more thing, April Fools!