CS5 - OK, I'm Impressed

I couldn't wait to get back home from my 200 mile motorcycle ride around Mt. Hood today. I wanted fresh material to work with in Photoshop CS5. It was a bright & sunny day and my luck was hold strong as I neared the viewing point I knew so well. There were mixed density puffy clouds over the mountain's summit making for a perfect opportunity. These conditions are rare as the mountain seems to have its own weather conditions.

CS5 is really impressive. I used the content aware editing a lot in this photo as I needed to remove cars and poles all up and down the highway. Being not only Sunday but Mother's Day here today traffic was very heavy on this country road.

Deleting unwanted objects is as simple as outlining them with the lasso selection tool and pressing the delete key. Voila! The object is not only gone but replaced by the background so perfectly it's as if it never was there. I removed 6 objects in less than one minute. Imagine doing that with the clone tool as I usually would.

More reports to come.

I agree it's quick but i'm less impressed so far with the results of the content aware bits.

The vids showed it to be awesome, but in reality it's much less so.

Still playing - so watch this space

Would love to see the original for comparison.

edited







original - notice the posts on the edge of the road & telephone support pole I removed
and the color balance difference

Lovely shot Bob.

It would be good to see (needn't be this picture) some really heavy object removals using CS5 - the sort of thing that the clone stamp tool just couldn't do.

I don't have CS5 but I just want to see whether I fancy it or not.

Agree with Phil - would be nice to see it do some real big work, like in the vids

Your shot is fab Bob

I have only had a quick play, and content aware seems great on little edits, but the results seem a bit unpredictable on bigger items. I haven't had much time to play around, so at the moment, I'm undecided.

I've been cloning out undesireable objects since I bought my first version of Photoshp, version 4.0. I've gotten pretty pretty darn good at it. My point in praising CS5 and its newly improved features is the time it saves me. To remove half a dozen roadside poles/trees etc. would have taken me 5 times longer than it does with CS5. Saving time is what it's all about not miracle tools. I do think the puppet tools come closest to that.

I've reported in other posts how good The Photoshop Elements software handles basic editing. It does it at 1/10 the cost of the full retail Photoshop software. I've come to count on masking, actions and other features of the full version. I got CS4 for $299 and upgraded to CS5 for $175. That's still cheaper than my version 4.0 Photoshop at $600 nearly 15-20 years ago. I believe CS5 retails for $725 now and it's on two of my computers.

I'm not a salesman for Adobe. I'm simply posting my first impression on the new software.

What I was trying to say was, there was a lot of hype over "content aware" and it is great for quick , small edits, but if you wanted something fairly big removed, don't expect the same results as something small.

Like I said, I've been really busy,so not had a good play, yet.

I am quite impressed with the content aware on small areas that need cloning out but had horrendous results when trying to rid the sky above a dogs head of a electricity pylon.

PS's content aware decided to use the dogs head as the content to replace the pylon with and nothing I could find to do would make it sample the sky instead. Not a good image, a double headed dog

Had to go resort to the old non content aware method.

But, CS5 is just not about content aware only. There are other new features that are worth investigating.

Steve