What I wanted to do was compile a list of the OTHER little things that got changed in Photoshop CS5, but that Adobe didn't publicly document - probably because most are so minor, they aren't selling points on their own. However, those of us obsessed with details (i.e. me) might find this stuff interesting. You might be surprised how many there are. Let's go!
General & Interface
- All toolbar icons have been redrawn and have a smoother, shaded, more subtle appearance.
- Toolbar icons all have a blue accent on mouseover (versus each tool having its own coloring).
- Most buttons in the Options Bar and dialogs have completed the transition to a borderless appearance to look more consistent with the updated borderless toolbar icons that appeared in CS4.
- The Workspaces area in the Application Bar can now be expanded to display multiple workspaces as buttons, instead of having to access a pull-down menu.
- The superfluous icons for the Hand, Zoom and Rotate View tools in the Application Bar have been removed.
- New Subtract and Divide blend modes. Good luck finding a use for either.
- The Filter Gallery uses a new base image (of a colorful sailboat) to demonstrate filter effects.
- The Options dialog for the Layers panel uses a new black and white sunflower photo as an icon for choosing thumbnail display size. (Curiously, the Channels Options dialog continues to use the old thumbnail, which was simply a black and white version of the old Layers image)
- In the Options dialog for the Info panel, the checkbox for Version Cue has been replaced with Adobe Drive.
- Clicking on the small arrow menu in the lower left of an open document window now directly brings up the menu to select what is displayed there, instead of hiding behind a "Show >" submenu. Also, the "Reveal in Bridge" option is gone from here, presumably because of the inclusion of Mini Bridge.
- Tabbed windows now have their 'x' close icon on the left side of the tab, which feels like a much better place for it.
- When dragging a selection or layer with the Move tool, a faint gray box appears around the selection or layer bounds. That means if you want to make sure something isn't (or is!) being clipped off, you don't have to turn on the "Show Transform Controls" option, or bring up Free Transform to quickly see the edges. It isn't always pixel-accurate, but it's good for general placement.
Tools
- The selection tools (and some others, like Zoom) have new cursors: instead of pixels that appear black or white based on the underlying color, they're now made of black pixels with a slight white outline, allowing them to be seen more easily over any color. This solves the issue of cursors "vanishing" over 50% gray. This is similar to how the brush cursors appear since CS4.
- The Magic Wand icon & cursor looks more "magical," even though it behaves the same as ever. It also adopts the same 'halo' as the other selection tools.
- The Quick Selection Tool - the Wand's more capable sibling - has a new, more-accurate brush-styled icon, versus the old "stick and blob" icon.
- The Pen tools have a redrawn pen tip that points at a downward angle, possibly to be more consistent with the angle of the other drawing tools.
- All tools that use a brush tip (brush, eraser, pencil, etc.) have new buttons in the Options Bar allowing brush size or opacity to be controlled by tablet pressure. These options override settings in the Brushes panel, making it much quicker to toggle pressure-based control on and off.
- All tools that use a brush tip (brush, eraser, pencil, etc.) have had a button in the Options Bar to toggle the Brushes panel, but the button's appearance used to vary between tools. This button is now consistent in appearance, and is now on the left side of the bar next to brush size (instead of floating way over to the right).
- The Clone Stamp also inherits the Brushes button placement change, along with having its button to toggle the Clone Source panel moved to the left next to the Brushes one.
- The Pattern Stamp has the same adjustment in button placement as the Clone Stamp, though without the Brushes panel button.
- The Clone Source panel has new icons next to the width and height fields that allows one-click mirroring of your cloned image. To accomplish this in CS4, you had to unlink the values and change your desired field to a negative value. The new method saves a lot of time and frustration.
- The Sponge Tool has a new "Vibrance" option. It seems to be based on the Vibrance command under Adjustments, and won't over-saturate colors as easily as the tool normally would.
- The Sharpen tool has a new "Protect Detail" option, which like the new Sponge tool option, may as well just be named "work better," as that's pretty much what turning this on accomplishes. With the option turned on, it takes much more effort to sharpen your image into a grainy, pixelly mess, and suddenly the tool becomes usable to sharpening portions of an image.
- While not a tool in the toolbar, if you look under Layer > Matting, there's a new option called Color Decontaminate. It seems to be based on the same technology behind the similarly-named option in the Refine Edge dialog, and, like the other options in the Matting menu, adjusts edge pixels of a layer; removing a color fringe in this case. Interestingly, it only works on a masked layer. It even works if your mask matches the transparency of the layer, though the results may be better with more masked pixels to draw from.
Mac Changes
- The yellow tooltips that appear when hovering over most icons and interface elements are now displayed in a slightly-larger Helvetica font, instead of the system font. (I'm unsure if this has changed on Windows.)
- The Help menu is now displayed in a smaller font than the other menus, matching standard Mac OS X convention. The various "How-to" links in the menu that would take you to specific Help pages have been removed.
- On Mac OS X, toggling your view to Full Screen with Menu Bar (by pressing "F") appears differently: Instead of filling the entire screen, it now respects the size of the Dock and no longer expands behind it, meaning no more Dock icons covering your canvas. Behavior in this mode in regards to zooming and panning still works as expected, however.
- When using standard windows versus tabbed documents, the traffic light buttons are positioned slightly off (above center, and tighter spacing) from standard Mac OS X windows. A bug perhaps, though an aesthetic one that doesn't affect usability. And one you won't even see if you use tabbed windows. (and why wouldn't you?)
- The Classic-era spinning watch that appears during long operations has been replaced with a more modern "pinwheel" animated icon. (is that the right term? Not the spinning rainbow beachball; think of the gray OS X boot screen, or Safari's progress indicator)
- Most "do you want to save before you close this file"-type dialog boxes and warnings now use bold text for the body of the copy.
Preferences
- In General Preferences, there's a new option that, when checked, will automatically turn any raster image into a Smart Object when dragged or placed into an open document.
- In File Handling Preferences (at least on a Mac), the options for saving both a Full Size preview and Mac thumbnail have been removed.
- In Performance Preferences, there are three new 'preset' buttons that will set History and Cache options based on certain types of documents (small with several layers, large with fewer layers, or the 'default' option). While just quick ways to change settings we've always had, it better explains what the numbers mean. There's also an option here to adjust the Cache Tile Size.
- In Cursors preferences, there's a new option labeled "Show only Crosshair While Painting," which does just what it says.
- While tied into the bigger feature that is CS Live, there's an option in Plug-In Preferences that allows you to disable the CS Live menu in the Application Bar.
And, most important of all...
- The "Ps" icon in the Application Bar is now more subtle engraved-style lettering instead of the full-color blue box in CS4, and therefore less distracting. Saved the best for last!
All in all, most of these are very minor changes, and while some are simply aesthetic ones, it turned out to be quite a long list, considering I'm only discussing the stuff Adobe *isn't* touting as changes or features. Add the legitimate features to this list, and you see CS5 is one of the most extensive Photoshop updates in years.
Have you been using CS5 and think I missed something? Let me know!
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