Two years after the release of the sleek and feature-packed Photoshop CS4, Adobe has released Photoshop CS5, filled with even more features and tools to please the most demanding photographer. But is an upgrade (and it’s price) essential for you?

Well, the CS (Creative Suite) 5 version does have some rather enticing photographer-friendly features that will definitely have you reaching for your credit card.

As many photographers know, selecting certain areas or segments of a photograph (e.g. selecting the sky in one of your landscape photos) can be a very tricky and sometimes even frustrating task.  The new adaptive selection tool  allows you to select intricate and complex areas with greater ease and precision. The new selection process isn’t perfect, but it is useful when you need to create a cut-out of objects or people or when removing an entire background from a photo.

There is also the Content-Aware Spot Healing Brush which will allow you to remove small but annoying details from your photos by just dragging the brush over the object you want removed and Photoshop will automatically replace it with the surrounding detail.

Adobe have also upgraded their version of Adobe Camera Raw with CS5, upgrading it to v.6.  This upgrade includes better noise control, a post crop vignette feature (which applies vignetting creatively to a shot rather than just trying to remove it) and new automatic lens correction tools.

For those of you who often use Adobe Bridge, CS5 now offers a neat little Mini Bridge Panel that allows you to browse the contents of your folders without having to switch back and forth between Photoshop and Bridge.

As with the previous version of Photoshop, users are offered both the Standard and Extended options.  While the Standard version will suffice for photographers, if you are a designer as well, then you might want to look into getting the Extended version because of the advanced 3D options it will offer you.

It seems that CS5 has some very perspective new features that may come in handy for many photographers, but whether they justify the price of an upgrade (especially since CS4 is still a great version in itself) is up to you.  Download the 30-day trial version from the Adobe site and see for yourself.

I for now, however, will stick to my CS4 because my editing needs aren’t that demanding but I would love to hear about what CS5 users have to say.  If you already have the new version or are testing the trial, let us know what you think, what the pros and cons in your opinion are and whether it’s really worth the upgrade, on the Discussion section of my Facebook page.

More information:

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/whatsnew/index.html?segment=photography