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Adobe Photoshop CS5

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Photoshop is the undisputed king of photography software, but many of us who use it every day haven’t bothered to buy every new version. With the launch of Photoshop CS5, which marks the 20th anniversary of the package, I wanted to know if the upgrade was worth the money.

CS5 has four major improvements that – on paper – jumped out at me. The most exciting is content-aware fill – and when I first used it on one of my photos, my jaw dropped.

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, it’s not the actual brickwork or plant that Photoshop recreates, but the progam’s 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 there’s more.