by Gavin Seim: I’ll keep this brief because Photoshop CS5 has been out for months now and reviews have been floating all over. Rather than get redundant with an ultra in depth review, I’ll just talk a little about what I think. I’ll be frank and you can make your own decision from there.

Photoshop CS5. Full = $699 – $999.
My overall rating 6.5/10.

New features worth noting…

• Content Aware tools are the big news in CS5. It works when lassoing and deleting sections of an image, using the healing brush and more. Neat tool, but not perfect. More on that below.
• New “Mixer Brushes” blend color like paint, similar to something like Painter (but less powerful).
• Crop has a rule of thirds overlay now (finally).
• Remastered HDR tools and Pseudo HDR with HDR toning. Better, but not perfect.
• Remastered Refine Edge. Will find more detailed edges for better masking and has automatic edge decontamination.
• Puppet Warp allows you to modify in a new ways. Move limbs, horizon lines and more by defining control points.
• New process versions and improved camera RAW.
• Mini bridge right within PS.

Content aware fill. This feels more like a beta feature. It got hyped a lot prior to release. Probably over hyped. Once we got the product in our hands, reality set in. Content Aware was not the magical tool that Adobe made it out to be in demo videos and they took some flack for it. I think the problem was that they showed it as being so perfected. Erasing entire areas of photos, cleaning out power lines with a single stoke. It looked wonderful in theory.