Blow Your Mind Up!

On April 12th, Adobe will release Adobe Creative Suite 5, and the advancement in Photoshop alone will make your head explode.  New features of CS5 have been leaking onto the web in the past month, and I don’t think enough people know how incredible this release will be.  Forgetting the cost of a new OS for Adobe Suite, once you do get it, these programs are making the sky the limit for all digital artwork.  Below is two sample videos of just two new features that are included in Photoshop CS5.  Please watch in awe, and wonder, “how the hell can a computer program do that?!”  But in all seriousness, watch and learn, and more importantly, dream about the possibilities you will be able to know achieve with your own work using these new options.

Puppet Warp

Content Aware Fill

Absolutely AMAZING, right?!  Before I leave you with those, and I could do just that, I wanted to talk just a bit about how these new features could be huge innovations in comic book art and comic book production.  Just think about what you just saw for a second.  The first video was able to put points on a figure or object and wrap it without distortion to whatever you need to do.  Say you draw a superhero’s arm, for example.  You can take that arm in CS5, put a point on it, and move it around to a different position that maybe looks better.  Instead of redrawing it on the computer, maybe you can just use this feature, and you now have unlimited possibilities about making your drawing almost come alive.  To be able to move around 2D images in Photoshop could change how we do color corrections, by making it possible to change anything bout an image.

In the second video, even more so, the possibilities are endless.  Say you have a colored comic book page, and all the clouds were drawn in and colored beautifully.  But the editor makes a correction, where you have to extend the sky on the page after say, you had to delete a whole panel of art.  Now you have to create clouds and sky that have been fully colored.  Before I would just use the clone tool to do my best to painstakingly try and mimic the colorists’ style and painting.  But now, with this feature, you can just make a selection and the program will fill in the clouds for you, making it seem like its just a continuation.  I’m sure you would have to touch it up a tiny bit here or there, but come on, how COOL is THAT?  Could be a HUGE time savor and useful tool in how we color and correct comics.

Technology has been accelerating so rapidly, and its amazing what we are already able to do.  But with features like this in a program already so vast, it can be a game changer.  It almost makes it seem like Photoshop is your own art assistant, more so then just a tool to use.  The AI is becoming increasing more powerful, and I for one can’t wait to play with this new Creative Suite!  I can’t wait to see how it can help continue to make the best and fastest quality comics we’ve ever seen!

Go to www.youtube.com to see more videos about Adobe’s new CS5 release, and if anyone gets the program this month, let me know how it is!

Until next time,

Corey Breen

Adobe Creative Suite 5 website: http://cs5launch.adobe.com/?sdid=FDTNU&

Tags: CS5, Photoshop