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From Adobe’s press release:

First Major Release since April 2010 Packed with New Features and Huge Performance Enhancements

SAN JOSE, Calif. — March 22, 2012 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe® Photoshop® CS6 beta, a preview of what’s to come in the next release of the industry standard in digital imaging, is available as a free download from Adobe Labs. Customers can download the beta, try out the experience and provide feedback to the product team. Packed with groundbreaking new innovations, features and incredible performance enhancements, Photoshop CS6 beta is available for the Mac OS and Microsoft® Windows® platforms. The final release is expected in the first half of 2012.

“Photoshop CS6 will be a milestone release that pushes the boundaries of imaging innovation with incredible speed and performance,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president products, Creative Media Solutions, Adobe. “We couldn’t wait to share this beta of Photoshop CS6 with our customers and are looking forward to hearing from them and seeing the ways they are incorporating the beta into their daily creative workflows.”

New Features in Photoshop CS6 Beta

Photoshop CS6 beta demonstrates Adobe’s focus on huge performance enhancements, imaging magic and creativity tools that offer customers a new experience in digital imaging. Key features include new additions to the Content-Aware tools: Content- Aware Patch allows greater control by letting users select and duplicate an area of an image to fill in or “patch” another, and Content-Aware Move lets users select and magically move an object to a new place in the image.

Customers will experience incredible performance, powered by the new Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine*, enabling near-instant results from popular editing tools including Liquify, Puppet Warp, Transform and Lighting Effects; and a refined, modern interface featuring dark UI options to make images pop. New and re-engineered design tools make creating designs faster and more efficient. Vector layers allow users to apply dashed lines and gradient strokes, searchable layers quickly zero in on any layer, and new type styles let designers swiftly apply type treatments to their designs.

In addition, the Photoshop CS6 beta offers all the features of Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended, such as new 3D editing features and quantitative imaging analysis capabilities. These features will be included in the shipping version of Photoshop CS6 Extended when it becomes available.

Pricing and Availability

The Photoshop CS6 beta is available immediately as a free download in English and Japanese. At installation, users will be required to provide an Adobe ID to complete a one-time login and online product activation. For information on how to install Photoshop CS6 beta, visit www.adobe.com/go/photoshopcs6. Customers can submit feedback via the Photoshop CS6 beta forum.

Users can also connect with the Photoshop team via the community-powered site; on Facebook; YouTube; Photoshop.com blog; or via Twitter.

Adobe has released Photoshop Lightroom 3.2, Camera Raw 6.2 and DNG Converter 6.2. These are final versions of updates that were originally posted as ‘release candidates’ on the Adobe Labs site, and are now available for immediate download. The latest versions provide final RAW support for sixteen recent cameras, including the Canon EOS 60D and Sony Alpha NEX-5. The updates also add more than 120 lens profiles and fix a number of bugs.

Click here to download Adobe Photoshop Lightroom v3.2 (Windows)

Click here to download Adobe Photoshop Lightroom v3.2 (Mac)

Click here to download Adobe Camera Raw and DNG Converter v6.2 (Windows)

Click here to download Adobe Camera Raw and DNG Converter v6.2 (Mac)

Lightroom is a pretty diverse program, which is simple to start learning, but contain hidden depths. Here’s some shortcut tricks that use modifier keys to access hidden features.

1. Straighten your Photo: Press ‘R’ to go to the crop mode in Develop. Press the Control key on PC, Command key on Mac. Then click on a point and drag to a second to let Lightroom rotate to make that line straight.

2. Quick Develop. You can access hidden settings in Quick Develop by holding down the Alt Key on PC, or the Option Key on Mac. This will change the Vibrance and Clarity controls into Saturation and Sharpening.

3. Print. In Custom or Print Package, hold down the Alt Key on PC, Option key on Mac, and drag a cell to make a duplicate copy of the cell, image included.

4. Catalogs. Hold down the Control Key on PC, Option key on Mac, when starting Lightroom to bring up the Select Catalog dialog box. From here you can choose between recent Catalogs, pick an alternative, unlisted, Catalog, or even create a new one.

5. Web. In the Web Module, you can cheat to access settings not available to you via the normal UI. Use the shortcut ‘Shift Control Alt /’ on PC, ‘Shift Command Option /’ on Mac, to turn the Appearance panel into a list of internal CSS tag items. To go back to normal, simply use the same shortcut again.

6. Color Picker. When you’re using the Color Picker in Slideshow, Print, or Web, sometimes you’d like to keep consistent colours between the work you’re doing, for example, using your brand colours. Find the colours via the Hex (or click on the word HEX to change to RGB) settings, then Alt/Option click on the swatches to save the colour for reuse elsewhere.

7. Setting your clipping points. Hold down the Alt/Option key and go to the Basic Panel in Develop. Drag Exposure, Blacks and Highlights in turn to see the points that are currently clipping. For example, clicking Exposure with Alt/Option held down will make the central area black. As you drag the slider, you can start to see the areas that are clipping. The colour represents the which channels are clipping, so red means the red channel is clipping etc. Recovery also makes the screen black, whereas Blacks will make the screen white.

8. Reset. Holding down Alt/Option will turn titles into Reset buttons. For example Presence becomes Reset Presence. Clicking this will reset all the Presence sliders.

9. Delete. Delete brings up a Remove/Delete box, or removes from a Collection. What if you want to get right of it no matter where it is? Here’s a dangerous shortcut to learn. ‘Shift Control Alt Delete Shift’ on PC, ‘Shift Command Option Delete’ on Mac. This is the ‘terminate with extreme predjudice’ command. It even deletes from within a collection. Use with care. Undo does not work with this command.

10. Change Import and Export. Holding down Alt/Option in Library will change the Import to Import Catalog, and Export will change to Export Catalog.

Related articles

• Review: Adobe Lightroom 3 (geek.com)
• The Best Plugins for Lightroom (brighthub.com)
• Lightroom 3: Sharpening Tool Tutorial (brighthub.com)
• Round Tripping with Lightroom (digital-photography-school.com)

Flawless skin can be key to successful portraits of ladies. Make their skin creamy soft by tapping the K key in Adobe Camera Raw 5 to call up the Adjustment Brush. Set the Clarity slider to ~40 for starters. Brush over the skin you want to smooth. Want it smoother? Drag the slider farther to the left. This is a great way to get proofs out quickly without losing gallons of time with the Healing Brush tool in Photoshop.